Infrastructure Platform

Modernizing 30-year-old infrastructure management solutions into a SaaS platform. Secured 24 renewals from the largest legacy customer.

Summary

I led research and design of a zero-to-one SaaS platform, reinventing infrastructure management from 30-year-old on-premise solutions.

The platform successfully reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) by consolidating solutions and increases productivity by turning paper-based processes into streamlined digital workflows on one single platform.

We secured renewals from the 24 largest legacy customers for adopting the new platform.

New Platform Growth

24 Adopters

Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

€1M / Customer / Year

Overview

Company

MOSAIC

Duration

2019 – 2022

My Role

Lead Designer

Interaction Designer

UX Researcher

Visual designer

Design Systems

Prototyping

Project Manager

Product Owner

Team (18)

1 UX Researcher

3 Backend Engineers

7 Frontend Engineers

1 CAD Engineer

1 Customer Success Manager

1 Product Owner

4 External Sales Partners

Stuck In The 90s

Infrastructure worth billions was managed and maintained using 30-year-old solutions.

AutoCAD was used for rendering technical land surveys as static maps.

Working with dated UIs was cumbersome.

Paper-based processes made field workers inefficient.

2 Major Problems To Solve

Several weeks of on-site research uncovered two major problems to solve.

Inefficient

  • Disjointed, paper-based processes

  • Print-outs and hand-written work documentation

Expensive

  • Cities ran private data centers

  • Niche solutions for each department

From Custom Solutions To A Standardized Platform

I hired a UX researcher. We shadowed over 100 people on-site across the customer base.

User Story Maps helped us:

  • Visualize processes, roles, and flow of information

  • Collaborate on the same research document

  • Share intuitive artifacts with product owners and engineers

One City - One Platform

The MOSAIC platform features:

  • Fully responsive Progressive Web Application (PWA)

  • Offline mode enables field workers to operate in remote places.

  • Off-the-shelf modules get new customers started right away.

  • Easy configuration of assets and workflows.

  • Automations make recurring inspection tasks and scheduling maintenance work a breeze.

The Strategy Changing 30 Years Of Habits

Starting from a legacy product can be both a curse and a blessing.

I helped define the new product strategy:

  1. Test product-market-fit
    Pilot core ideas as an MVP with 5 selected customers.

  2. Migrate customers
    Before acquiring new customers, bring over existing ones due to the high customer acquisition cost (CAC).

  3. Acquire new
    Once the largest customers upgraded, acquire new customers and scale the business.

Augmenting Material Design

I established a design system based on Google’s Material Design to improve:

  1. faster development

  2. consistent user experience.

Users liked the familiar ‘Android look and feel’ from Google’s Material Design.

Over time, I added new components to better serve the platforms’ use cases:

  • interactive user-defined maps (field worker productivity),

  • collaborative productivity (shared dataset views), and

  • guided workflows.

Digital Efficiency Boost

With guidance from experts, we configured off-the-shelf workflows.

Experts set up workflows based on best practices

Lesser-qualified workers

How I Shifted Power From IT To Operations

Emergent web technologies enabled faster-loading interactive maps in the web browser instead of rendering static drawings in AutoCAD.

I designed features that empower workers (instead of relying on administrators to make changes):

  • Task-based maps
    Use task-based maps (instead of one giant everything-map) .

  • Asset catalog
    Add assets to any map (instead of admins changing the config files).

  • Visualize assets by variables
    Change the variables used to visualize an asset in a map.

Precision Over Simplicity

Civil engineers require millimeter precision in designing infrastructure.

MOSAIC runs integrated into AutoCAD, enabling civil engineers to:

  1. Visualize high-precision CAD drawings,

  2. Construct new elements, and

  3. Dynamically visualize other infrastructure for context.

Securing 24 Large Customer Renewals

MOSAIC grew from 5 early adopters in 2019 to 24 fully-operating customers in 2021.

By 2021, 15 cities adopted at least 2 modules in the platform.

Customers reduced their total cost of ownership (TCO) by €1M per year on average by upgrading.

New platform customer growth

↑ 24 adopters

Reduction in total cost of ownership

↓ € 1M / customer / year

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