Hyper growth, legacy product, new platform
Talkdesk is a Contact Center as a Service moving from SMB into enterprise on a new platform, Atlas. I joined a team of six to migrate a legacy admin experience into something that could carry it.
A legacy product still in production, no documentation, a company reorganising at pace. Design quality here was not delight but trust and structural clarity at speed.
Design the new paradigm. Hire and scale the team.
- Create the information architecture and experience paradigm for CX Cloud
- Ship the new Admin app: permissions, billing, workflow studio, reporting, WFM, AI
- Redesign Talkdesk Live: responsiveness, alerts centre, onboarding
- Manage 6 designers; own hiring, onboarding and process as the org scaled 6 to 60+
Map first, design second
I mapped every admin and product touchpoint across the legacy platform and the emerging Atlas suite, through co-creation, interviews and workshops.
New Information Architecture model
Problem. An outdated configuration experience, new Atlas requirements, adjacent product needs pulling apart.
Solution. One architecture, defined with the other product teams and business units rather than handed to them.
Validation. A tree test before anything was built: task completion, time on task, directness, achievement.
People, Routing and Settings, with every configuration surface under one of the three
Tree test on 36 users, scored per task
The Work
Platform design at enterprise depth
The Admin work was heaviest: a new configuration app covering permissions, billing, workflow studio, reporting, WFM and AI, every surface holding up under enterprise procurement.
Talkdesk Live ran in parallel: responsive dashboards, an alerts centre, onboarding supervisors could run themselves.
Product design process at Talkdesk
The first time design presented at the company keynote, on how product design ran here.
Product design community workshops
Problem. The org grew tenfold in three years. Process strained, consistency suffered.
Solution. Surface the real problems, then co-define drivers and actions with the team itself.
Double Diamond structure across both sessions.
Product Design - Community drivers
Four drivers came out of the first session: culture, collaboration, knowledge, consistency. The second gave every action point an owner.
Three calls that shaped the outcome
Treat the admin and configuration interface as a product
Not a settings page. It is what enterprise buyers evaluate.
A reporting dashboard is a tool for decision-making
We stripped what merely proved the tool could do it, and rebuilt around what the reader needed to act on.
Invest in the org as much as the product
Design quality does not scale with headcount but with the standards built into the team.
What the work had to hold up to
Admin, Reporting and Billing were the surfaces renewals turned on. I owned all three with a team of six as the org grew past sixty.
What this changed
The quality ceiling of a design organisation is set by its culture and processes, not its headcount.
Growing tenfold cost convergence. Processes drifted, ways of working diverged, consistency slipped, and the culture that held six designers did not stretch to sixty.
The workshop was the diagnosis, not an offsite. The four drivers the org named were exactly what growth had taken. My job was not to spot the damage but to get sixty people to name it and own the fix.