Research synthesis · Root-cause analysis · Workshop facilitation · Future-state framing
Leading Product Discovery to Reframe an Internal Platform
Turning a fragmented, low-trust internal platform into a clear, redesignable system.
Hero image — discovery synthesis / concept direction
ROLE
CX & Innovation Strategist (research & strategy lead)
CLIENT
B2B events & lead-generation company
TIMELINE
6 weeks
TEAM
Me + design partner · client stakeholders
MY FOCUS
Discovery · synthesis · problem framing · future-state
METHODS
Research synthesis · root-cause · workshops · framing
THE CHALLENGE
The company ran an internal platform ("Hub") for managing events and customer interactions. On paper it worked. In reality, users struggled to navigate and complete tasks, teams built parallel systems outside the platform, and data-quality issues left people with low trust in the outputs.
The experience was functional — but fundamentally misaligned with how people actually work. The risk wasn't a missing feature; it was a system people had quietly stopped relying on. That made this a discovery problem first: before anyone could redesign, someone had to define the real problem and a direction worth building toward.
MY ROLE
I led the product discovery end to end: synthesizing scattered customer and stakeholder feedback into a sharp problem definition, diagnosing root causes rather than cataloguing symptoms, and shaping the future-state direction the redesign would follow.
Synthesized research across customers and stakeholders into clear, actionable experience themes
Co-led the workshops that aligned teams on the problem and the future-state direction
Partnered with design to translate the direction into visual concepts, and presented findings and direction directly to client stakeholders
APPROACH
Synthesis into a problem definition
Turned fragmented customer and stakeholder feedback into a structured set of experience themes — not a pile of findings, but a clear statement of what was broken.
Symptoms to root causes
Pushed past "navigation is confusing" to why: why navigation failed, why trust eroded, why people worked around the system. Root causes are what you can actually redesign against.
The reframe
We shifted the effort from "improve the platform" to "redesign the experience around how users actually do their work" — the foundation for every downstream decision.
Alignment through workshops
Co-led sessions that brought teams to a shared understanding of the problem and the future-state direction, then partnered with design to make that direction tangible.
SOLUTION
Three root causes drove the breakdown. The system was built for data, not users — it mirrored internal data structures instead of workflows, so "hard to find where to do it" was a top pain point. Trust was eroded by data quality — duplicates, inaccuracies, missing metrics, and manual workarounds meant people didn't believe what they saw. And users built workarounds — tracking work externally and leaning on tribal knowledge.
The future-state direction answered each one: align structure to workflows, restore trust through metric visibility, support end-to-end event stages, and cut cognitive load by making next steps clear.
Root-cause map / future-state direction
IMPACT
In six weeks, the work established a clear problem definition grounded in real user behavior, created alignment on why the experience was failing, and gave the team a redesign foundation rooted in customer workflows rather than internal systems. The direction held: it carried forward into further concept and design development.
WHY IT MATTERS
Discovery is where the most expensive decisions get made — before anything is built. This project shows the judgment that work requires: refusing to redesign symptoms, insisting on root causes, and turning a vague sense of "the platform is bad" into a problem definition a team could act on.
It's also a reminder that internal tools are customer experience too. When employees stop trusting a system, the workarounds they build leak straight into what customers feel — so restoring that trust is a business problem, not a UI polish exercise.
NEXT PROJECT
ESPN →
© Millie Rosasco