Three products, many insights, an acquisition

Constraint: the product had three independent surfaces (client-facing challenge management, backend administration, company-facing dashboards) that had evolved without a fully shared design foundation. Some screens used different layout logic, no component system existed, and the visual inconsistencies compounded across all three surfaces. The design system was built to address this with unified typography, spacing, colour, and component behaviour across every surface.

Market gap: the crowdsourcing product was functional, the design system made it cohesive, and revenue was steady and sustainable, but engagement was not compounding. The product solved a real problem, but the addressable market was narrower than the technology warranted. The design problem shifted from fixing the interface to determining whether the product solved the right problem at all.

Decision: narrow the product to brainstorming, the feature users had shown the most enthusiasm for. The tool shipped under its own name, Brainsto, rebuilt from scratch with new information architecture, interaction patterns, and a visual language specific to idea generation and organisation.

Session design: brainstorming ran as async guided sessions rather than a blank page: a framed question, timed steps that opened with benefits before asking for ideas, a single input, and every submission captured as a card. The structure lowered the bar to contribute while keeping the output organised enough to act on afterwards.

Signal: feedback was positive, but user behaviour told a different story. One session produced over fifty idea cards in forty minutes and a month later, not one had moved. Teams generated ideas enthusiastically, sorted them and planned ahead but then stopped, because no structured path existed to convert them into actionable items. The brainstorming tool captured creativity effectively, but it ended at the moment of capture, and the real work happened in tools not designed for collaborative decision-making.

Research: structured user research sessions with existing customers and prospects from both product phases. Participants described their workflows around ideation, project intake, resource planning, and portfolio reviews, the pattern was consistent across almost every session.

Finding: different teams were drowning in different project management tools. One platform for intake, another for planning, a third for tracking, with spreadsheets and slides bridging the gaps. The real market opportunity was not a better brainstorming tool but a project portfolio management platform that made the entire workflow from idea to execution feel like a single product. This insight depended on having shipped two previous iterations: the crowdsourcing phase taught structured ideation workflows, and the brainstorming phase revealed the execution gap.

Competitive landscape: the PPM hypothesis was mapped against Asana, Microsoft Project, Trello, and ClickUp across task management, Gantt views, resource management, reporting, and pricing. Each tool was strong in its own lane, but none connected structured ideation to portfolio-level decision-making, which was exactly the gap two product iterations had exposed.

Empathy mapping: sessions with project managers made that gap concrete. What they said (a need for clear timelines and simpler cross-team communication) diverged from what they felt (deadline stress, frustration at inefficiencies spread across too many channels). The distance between the two is where the product had to live.

Constraint: the information architecture had to shift from sessions and ideas to projects, initiatives, resource allocations, and portfolio-level reporting. The mental model moved from divergence to convergence and from creation to evaluation. A full UX research cycle covered competitive analysis of existing PPM tools, contextual interviews with project managers and portfolio directors, workflow mapping exercises and prototype testing with prospective customers.

Design response: the design system was rebuilt for the third time, now covering intake, planning, resource management, and reporting while staying consistent across modules. Navigation was redesigned around portfolio-level views with drill-down into projects and tasks. The visual language shifted from collaborative and playful to structured and professional, matching the data-heavy context of resource decisions and budget allocations. Multiple usability rounds refined the intake pipeline, resource allocation board, and portfolio dashboard until feedback narrowed from structural changes to surface-level polish.

Portfolio structure: portfolios were structured as steps and gates rather than flat task lists. The Gantt view exposed dependencies, phase gates, and statuses in a single reading, so a portfolio director could judge the health of an initiative without opening a single project.

Data model: the Smart PowerPoint exporter exists because one portfolio director admitted, almost apologetically, to rebuilding the same deck every Monday morning. It bound live portfolio data to slide placeholders, so status decks rebuilt themselves instead of being remade by hand. Underneath it, every collection is a table of custom fields that teams shape themselves: toggle fields on and off, reorder them by drag, then filter, group, and sort from the column header. Those tables quietly absorbed the spreadsheets that had been bridging the gaps, and reporting followed the same logic, from global search to a centralised inbox.

Product-market fit: the PPM platform found its market. The fifty-plus idea cards that never moved now had somewhere to go. The company was acquired on the strength of the pivot, validating the user research that drove the transition from brainstorming to portfolio management.

Three design systems, one trajectory: each product iteration required a new design system, and each one informed the next. The crowdsourcing system taught broad-surface consistency, the brainstorming system taught deep-flow optimisation and the PPM system combined both. The trajectory was not planned on a roadmap, but the design decisions across all three phases were consistent because they were driven by the same methodology: ship, listen, pivot.

Design as product discovery: the user research that defined the pivot, the workflow design that shaped the product architecture and the visual system that made the platform coherent were design outcomes that directly influenced the company's trajectory and its eventual acquisition. The engagement started as interface advice and became the mechanism for finding the right product.