Translations work management
0-to-1 product design case study summary:
How I was able to digitally transform a $700m+ company's entire production capacity by designing one application
The following is a summary of the more detailed case study. Email me for the full deck.
The problem: How do we reimagine the infrastructure of a $700m+ company … and build it in-flight?
TransPerfect is the largest language services company in the world, currently a $1.2b, then a $700m+ business.
Their translations work is responsible for a significant portion of their revenue, but their infrastructure had difficulty keeping up with the company's rapid growth.
Dozens of attempts were made over the years to improve this but never quite fully addressed the problem, until one day the director of technology came to me, and the resulting collaboration created something groundbreaking.
Out-of-control process debt reduced to a single product
I led TransPerfect's most successful effort to unify their entire production work management process, this time under a single product. On launch, it was rapidly adopted by thousands of Project Managers (PMs) daily to run the entire company's production capacity.
My design work was done at scale and spanned interaction/UI, architecture, service, and process design. I was able to:
Heavily influence product vision
Minimize workflows that used to span entire products into single modal windows
Reimagine decades-old communication artifacts
Remove massive amounts of process debt
And much more
Workloads cut in half, skyrocketing voluntary adoption
Other evidence of impact includes:
Multiple departments in the company changing their processes around the product
Mass abandonment of ongoing training sessions despite increased usage
Uncovered previously unknown behavior/process models, and supporting tools
"It's actually difficult to quantify just how much positive impact Nathan's work had on the business, our staff, and our clients; but while every team member is important, the TechOps team, and quite possibly parts of the business at large, would look very different today without him."
Do everything, collaborate with everyone
Through broad and deep work, I was able to drive design while collaborating across all domains.
Primary responsibilties:
- Product vision and strategy
- Research, synthesis, usability
- IA, workflow/process design
- UI/content/interaction design
- Major feature designs
Other major contributions:
- Visual design language
- Dev collaboration/spec. writing
- Delegating work for other designers
Collaboration:
4 to 8 - Developers
1 - Lead stakeholder, 2-6 rotating
2 - Product Managers
1 - Junior designer (Feature carve outs)
1 - Senior designer (Init. visual language)
1 - Myself (Everything else)
[Nathan's] problem solving and analysis of user and business problems went so deep that we found new ways to look at our problems and processes after decades in the business …
For research: conversations and data deep dives
I directly led and executed mixed methods research, synthesis, and insight/principle development, which greatly shed light on the nature of the problem space.
I was able to uncover many previously unknown insights about TransPerfect's processes, changing how the company approached them as an organization.
Deep dives, soft syntheses, and tell the story of the entire process
Many people approach problems using prebaked frameworks; but these frequently don't represent the problem at hand.
Thus, I often develop bespoke approaches to visualizing problems. In these examples, I visualized both high level process ecosystems and detailed workflows that teams previously weren't able to nail down.
The above is an intro to how we took a total of 1 year to go from absolute zero to a successful V1 launch. This and immediate follow-up designs proved wholly transformational for the $1b company. Interested in the full story? Send me an email.