Executive Triaging System - Condensed

Role: Product Designer

Team: Creative Director, Technical Lead, Product Manager, Junior Designer

Context and Challenge

• Contoso's Office of the CEO team managed requests for the CEO (“Janet”) through emails, printouts, and manual handoffs.

• This led to inefficiencies and missing context for critical engagements.

• Goal: Move the workflow to a single digital platform that supported intake, triage, scheduling, and archival of executive requests, while giving each team member flexibility for their unique workflows.

My Contributions

• Reviewed and redesigned existing screens that lacked hierarchy and usability.

• Conducted user testing with OCEO team members to validate designs and workflows.

• Built high-fidelity prototypes in Figma to communicate features and flows to both stakeholders and developers.

• Established and maintained a design system with documented components to align design and development.

• Partnered daily with developers to validate feasibility, prioritize features, and QA implementation.

Process Highlights

• Stopping the “marriage”: Advocated against approving poorly designed screens that were about to be finalized. Presented alternatives that emphasized clarity, hierarchy, and speed of use. The OCEO team agreed that new screens needed to be designed and adopted our direction.

• Prototyping and Testing: Created clickable prototypes to demonstrate workflows like intake, triage, and request tracking. This reduced confusion and helped stakeholders quickly grasp new features.

• Design System Development: Organized UI elements into atoms, molecules, and organisms, then built pages from these components. Introduced a change log (“Dev Page”) that became the single source of truth for developers.

Core Features:

• Intake and Triage: Centralized process for request lifecycle (intake → triage → prep → execution → archive).

• Custom Trackers: Allowed team members to build up to 10 personalized trackers for their unique responsibilities.

• Dashboards: Designed layouts to surface the most relevant details at a glance, reducing context-switching.

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Outcome and Impact

• Delivered a functional design system and working prototypes that guided development.

• Simplified workflows for the OCEO team by consolidating scattered processes into one platform.

• Enabled developers to work faster and more consistently by using the Dev Page as a shared reference.

• Received strong positive feedback from both stakeholders and developers on usability and collaboration.

Learnings

• Transitioned from an envisioning role to a true product design role, shaping and iterating on a live product.

• Learned how to prioritize features, balance constraints, and think long-term about system scalability.

• Built my first design system, which improved my ability to collaborate effectively with developers.

• Gained confidence in pushing back on flawed solutions and advocating for designs that truly support user needs.