01 — Affogata · B2B SaaS Product Design Case Study
Lead product designer — and the only designer — in a 6-person startup. No research budget. No safety net. Just a hand-drawn wireframe and a deadline.
My contribution
I led the end-to-end design of the platform: information architecture, workflows, UI, and the design-system foundations the team built on. I worked day to day with the CEO, CTO, two developers, and the customer success team, and stayed close to enterprise clients through the company's move from a single-client tool to a B2B SaaS product. The same end-to-end approach shows up in my Push App and News Fusion case studies.
The brief
Brand health monitoring
All public posts & comments
Parameters to segment data
Research
Sat with the CTO and CEO to map the vision. Asked developers what was technically real. Learned what the investor-client actually needed to do. Later, CS became my permanent research channel.
Twitter's advanced search (CEO's mental model). Brandwatch and Sprout Social for enterprise conventions. What do power users in this space already expect?
Three roles need three views. Real-time matters for gaming communities. Familiarity beats novelty. Permissions need to flex as we scale.
"Many of these assumptions were validated later when real customers arrived. But that day, I was designing on intuition and stakeholder input."
Mockup → Shipped
First mockup
Shipped
Decisions
Full permissions. Creates and batches searches, sees everything teams build.
Role-based access. Creates individual and team searches.
Read-only. Sees what team leaders share with them.
1Step 1: Start with a stack of profile, label, and keyword filters.
2Step 2: Combine multiple stacks with AND / OR operators.
3Step 3: Exclude topics or keywords to sharpen the search.
The dashboard
Built for middle and top management — sentiment, trending topics, CS response times. Every widget earns its place by surfacing an action, not a number.
Outcome
During my time there the platform grew from its first client to 12 SaaS customers, including teams behind major gaming titles. As we onboarded eToro and the gaming studios, CS reported new clients adapted to the platform quickly. Most requests were for more features — not fixes to existing workflows. The bones held.
Learnings
Stakeholder conversations, competitive analysis, dev constraints, and being ready to iterate on post-launch feedback got me 80% of the way.
Modular system, permission-based architecture, separation of concerns — these gave us room to grow without redesigning the core.
Ant Design felt like compromising on uniqueness. It was the right call. Shipping "good enough" beat designing "perfect" slowly.
The visual search builder existed because complex logic had to be simple — without testing. Sometimes you innovate because you have no other choice.
When real clients arrived, their feedback was more valuable than any speculative research. The job was building a foundation flexible enough to receive it.
Reflection
Push for clearer product vision before opening Figma. The single-client → SaaS pivot worked, but it left technical debt.
The search builder was our biggest UX risk. With more time, an interactive prototype tested with 3–5 potential users before any dev work.
Many decisions were implicit. Writing down the rationale would have onboarded new team members faster — and prevented re-litigating solved problems.
Let's discuss how I can help bring your next project to life.