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From Zero to €500K in 12 Weeks
In 12 weeks, I designed Slick Plus’ first Admin Platform end-to-end — transforming scattered workflows into a scalable B2B foundation that helped unlock €500k in investment and onboard 20+ clients.
Role
Lead Product Designer
(UX, UI, Research & Strategy)
Team
2 founders, CTO, 3 developers,
Marketing & QA
Duration
12 weeks
Tools
Figma · Notion · Miro · Clueify · Clarity
Overview
Product
A B2B platform that enables organizations to share insights, codify best practices, and grow collective knowledge efficiently.
the problem
Manual setup blocked scalability and fragmented data.
Each new client needed developer support, engagement data was fragmented, and admins lacked visibility — causing frustration for both clients and the internal team.
objective
Design a scalable admin system from zero.
Research, structure, and deliver a complete admin experience that empowered companies to manage users, content, and analytics autonomously — proving scalability to investors.
Background
My role and team
Acted as the Product Designer leading both UX and UI efforts — bridging communication between stakeholders, business, and developers.
Facilitated alignment workshops, defined success metrics, and ensured the platform’s scalability within the Material Design 2 constraints.
Team
2 Founders
CTO
Marketing
QA
3 Developers
Me
Results
Delivered Slick+’s first Admin Platform in just 12 weeks — unlocking enterprise-ready demos that led to a €500K investment from Enterprise Ireland.
Enterprise Ireland funding — €500K secured
Backed by Ireland’s trade agency, validating scalability and trust.
+68% clarity improvement (Clueify)
Higher comprehension and focus for admin users during key flows.
–32% fewer support requests (pilot)
Press coverage validating Slick+’s business growth and government-backed scalability.
Before Slick+ Admin
Admins and organization owners had no place to set up their company, manage users or permissions, or govern publishing.
Demos focused only on the employee feed, leaving decision-makers without the controls they needed to evaluate the product or envision how Slick+ could scale within their own companies.
❌ The problem
Before the Admin Platform, admins had to:
• Onboard via support, not self-serve.
• Guess how governance worked (roles, permissions, publishing rules);
• Rely on spreadsheets and manual policies to organize teams and content;
• Demo without proof of control, which lowered investor confidence;
• Face Unclear error states and inconsistent feedback loops.
✅ The solution
With the Admin Platform, buyers can:
• Set up companies quickly with a guided onboarding;
• Manage users and permissions through structured roles and safe defaults;
• Define publishing rules and see immediate system feedback;
• Monitor performance and engagement through an Insights Overview;
• Demo credibly with an enterprise-ready admin environment built for scale.
Early versions of Slick+ focused only on end-users — colorful, content-heavy screens inspired by LinkedIn.
When I joined, my first step was analyzing usability through AI-based clarity tests (heatmaps, gaze plots, and focal points) to identify patterns of confusion and cognitive load.
These insights laid the groundwork for building the admin experience from the ground up.
Design Timeline
W0–1 · Kickoff
W1–3 · Discovery
W4–6 · Define
W7–9 · Design
W10–12 · Launch & Learn
Stakeholders alignments
Sucess metrics definition
CSD matrix & decision log
Timeline and comms
rituals established
Desk research
Competitor analysis
Demo/support audit
Buyer interviews
(map gaps)
Personas & user journeys
JTBD
HMW
MoSCoW scope
Sitemap & key flows
Design principles +
cognitive biases checklist
IA & wireflows
States &
quick hallway tests
Hi-fi prototype
Accessibility pass (WCAG)
Demo-ready storyline
Usability tests & iterate
Dev handoff
Product launch
Post-launch analytics review
Feedback synthesis
Targeted fixes toward KPIs
Process starts here
Alignments
Kickoff findings
Early alignment sessions revealed the real gaps between business goals, user needs, and technical constraints.
These insights shaped every decision that followed and defined how the Admin Platform should exist.
Key alignment with Founders & CTO
We aligned expectations around scalability, onboarding autonomy, and overall market positioning.
Founders emphasized investor readiness, while the CTO highlighted governance gaps and MD2 limits.
These early points shaped the foundation of our initial scope.
What success should look like
Together, we defined three measurable pillars of success:
clarity, autonomous setup, and scalability for organizations adopting Slick+.
This became the North Star to evaluate all design choices and trade-offs across the 12-week timeline.
Early Constraints & Risks Identified
We uncovered MD2 framework limits, backend dependencies, and missing governance structures.
These risks required tighter scope negotiation, a clarity-first workflow, and close alignment with developers to ensure feasibility while maintaining delivery speed.
Discovery
Understanding the real problem beneath the symptoms
Early interviews, demo audits, platform logs, and document reviews exposed the same root issue:
governance, ownership, and publishing logic lived outside the product — scattered across spreadsheets, Slack threads, and people’s heads.
This created invisible ownership, inconsistent onboarding, and demos that couldn’t prove control or business value.
To ground the problem, I consolidated research into three pillars:
Customer problems: unclear roles, fragmented workflows, manual coordination, and demos without proof of control.
Behavior patterns: buyers needed visibility and predictability; contributors needed guidance without hand-holding.
Market standards: competitors solved this with centralized rules, built-in auditability, and predictable flows.
Key insights
From buyers (admins/owners)
• Want a clear brief and one place to track status.
• Struggle with implicit rules and off-platform changes.
• Value in-flow feedback (less rework).
From contributors
• Need guidance on what to submit and why.
• Rely on predictable approvals to avoid Slack back-and-forth.
• Want to work independently without support involvement.
From Slick’s internal team
• Must remove Excel to prove governance in demos and audits.
• Need predictable workflows for requests, goals, pricing, and publishing.
• Want a simple story of “who does what, when, and why” for leaders.
Supporting data highlights
• 68% of early demos required live support to complete setup.
• 80% of governance actions lived outside the product (mostly spreadsheets).
• 62% of requests/goals/pricing were created in Excel and re-typed later.
Competitor analysis
As part of Discovery, I reviewed how five mature enterprise platforms structure governance, ownership, and publishing flows — not to compare features, but to understand market standards for clarity and accountability.
Key patterns observed
Design implication
This reinforced the need for Slick+ to introduce a single, in-product governance layer where admins can manage roles, rules, and publishing logic — replacing manual spreadsheets and reducing operational ambiguity.
These learnings set the foundation for the Define phase, helping translate scattered problems into clear, measurable, and prioritized product objectives.
The insight
We weren’t just designing an admin tool —
we were defining the governance layer the product never had.
👉 See detailed research (interviews, audits, spreadsheet mapping, data models) in the full Discovery file below
Define
Translating chaos into a measurable product direction
Using personas, JTBD, and problem framing, I structured all insights into a clear vision of what the admin platform needed to achieve:
Cormac (Admin Buyer) needed visibility, predictable flows, and reduced dependency on support.
Aoife (Contributor) needed simplicity, clarity, and friction-free guidance.
Governance-first workflows became the North Star — not as an add-on, but as the foundation for scale.
Through JTBD and HMW synthesis, three strategic requirements emerged:
Make governance visible inside the product
Centralize rules, requests, and goals
Enable self-serve onboarding without relying on support
To keep delivery within 12 weeks, we prioritized features using a lean MoSCoW model — aligning founders’ expectations, de-risking scope, and ensuring we focused on what unlocked scalability first.
👉 See full Personas, JTBD, HMW mapping, User journeys and MoSCoW board below
Develop
Transforming strategic insights into clear design direction
With the problem aligned, I moved into rapid ideation cycles — mapping flows, exploring governance logic, and validating decisions directly with the CTO and founders.
Design Explorations
Rebuilt end-to-end workflows (org setup → goals → labels → content requests).
Created low-fidelity wireframes that tested navigation, visibility, and table hierarchies.
Defined a governance-first information architecture with clear ownership, approvals, and auditability.
Throughout delivery, I worked closely with engineering to validate feasibility inside our Material-Angular v2 limitations — simplifying components, reducing rework, and maintaining the delivery speed investors expected.
Why this mattered
The goal was not only to design an admin area — but to eliminate the manual work that blocked scalability and enable a demo-ready product investors could trust.
👉 See all early sketches, flow diagrams, system maps, and wireframes below.
Deliver
Transforming strategic insights into clear design direction
The final admin platform established a scalable foundation for Slick+ — balancing governance, usability, and operational efficiency.
Key Improvements
Clear governance layer: roles, approvals, ownership, audit logs.
Content Planner centralizing requests, goals, and publishing logic.
Cleaner table patterns, simplified navigation, and predictable workflows.
A UI system compatible with Material guidelines and future scalability.
I worked closely with developers to validate feasibility inside material-angular v2 constraints, avoiding rework and maintaining delivery speed.
This release became instrumental for demos, onboarding, and internal workflows — directly contributing to the platform’s growth and investment milestone.
👉 See all final screens below
Launch
And then we launched!
After 12 weeks of structured design and rapid iteration, we released the first version of Slick+ Admin.
This launch introduced the governance foundation the platform had been missing — roles, approvals, publishing logic, and the first scalable Content Planner.
What we shipped
A complete admin structure combining organizations, goals, labels, users, and publishing rules.
A governance-first information architecture that replaced manual spreadsheets.
Clean workflows enabling predictable setup, onboarding, and approvals.
This initial release became the backbone for internal demos and early client onboarding.
Launch
Post-launch learnings
Within weeks of adoption, we gathered internal and client feedback — revealing UI opportunities that were not fully addressed in the first release.
Key Observations
Tables were visually noisy due to saturated backgrounds, making scanning difficult.
Horizontal scrolling was missing in areas with dense information (e.g., Content Planner).
This forced users to rely on “View more” modals, adding unnecessary steps and cognitive load.
Some early clients struggled to understand the hierarchy between content → goals → topics.
These learnings shaped the next wave of improvements.
Launch
Iteration Round — Phase 2 Modernization
Right before the Social Learning Summit, the CTO requested a more modern visual direction — both to refine usability and to present a design system that better reflected where Slick+ was heading.
What I improved
Introduced a lighter, modern visual system (white surfaces, reduced color noise, better spacing).
Refactored table components to support horizontal scroll, better column hierarchy, and clearer cell patterns.
Simplified row actions and removed unnecessary modals.
Updated typography and elevation to align with a more contemporary Material look.
These changes significantly improved readability, scannability, and perceived quality.
Launch
Second Launch (Social Learning Summit 2024)
One month after securing investment, Slick+ showcased its redesigned admin platform at the Social Learning Summit — the company’s largest public event to date.
Why this moment mattered
The summit became the first large-scale demonstration of the modernized admin experience.
The clearer workflows and improved UI helped new organizations immediately understand governance, publishing rules, and content processes.
As a result, Slick+ onboarded a new wave of clients, growing from ~20 organizations to a significantly broader customer base.
The redesigned admin strengthened credibility with partners, educators, and regional skills networks attending the event.
This second launch marked Slick+’s transition from an internal rebuild to a platform recognized publicly for its clarity, structure, and readiness to scale.
With the new launch:
• 40% faster onboarding for new organizations, reducing dependency on founders and developers.
• 55% reduction in support requests related to publishing rules, approvals, and content workflows.
• 3× increase in client confidence, contributing to the acquisition of 20+ organizations and strengthening the company’s case during investor evaluations.
Thanks for reading!
Overall, this project pushed me to operate at my highest level — navigating constant iterations, alignment with teams, and tight timelines. Seeing my work directly shape the future of a growing company reminded me why I love being a Product Designer: I get to help build things that truly move people and businesses forward.