Hyper growth, legacy product, new platform
Talkdesk is a Contact Center as a Service in hyper growth mode, expanding from SMB into enterprise and building a new cloud CX platform called Atlas. I joined a team of 6 product designers with a clear mandate: migrate a legacy admin experience into something that could serve the scale and ambition of what Atlas was becoming.
The context was complex: a legacy Main product still in production, a small design team with aggressive scaling targets, no clear product or design documentation, and a company reorganising itself around new business units at pace. Design quality here wasn't about delight. It was about trust and structural clarity at speed.
Design the new paradigm. Hire and scale the team.
- Lead and document all product and admin touchpoints across the legacy Main platform and the new Atlas suite
- Create a new information architecture and experience paradigm for CX Cloud that could serve current and future business needs
- Design and ship the new Admin app: user management, permissions, billing, workflow studio, reporting, WFM and AI products
- Redesign Talkdesk Live with improved dashboard responsiveness, a new alerts centre, and guided onboarding
- Represent design at Inside Talkdesk 2021 and co-lead a 60-designer workshop on design org and process
Map first, design second
Before anything was designed, the first task was to map and document every admin and product touchpoint across the legacy Main platform and the emerging Atlas suite. Discovery involved structured co-creation and mapping sessions, customer interviews and advisory sessions, alongside cross-functional workshops to identify key use cases, business and information architecture requirements.
The new Admin IA was validated with a tree test: measuring task completion, time on task, directness, and task achievement before a single UI component was built. The gap between what users said they needed and what they actually did was significant. Closing that gap started with the architecture, not the interface.
A new platform experience
The core problem wasn't visual. The legacy admin experience had accumulated years of scope and technical debt and couldn't be patched into Atlas. It had to be rethought from the ground up. Every product team had built their own configuration touchpoints independently. There was no coherent structure, no shared model, no foundation to build on.
The design problem was architectural: create an information architecture for CX Cloud that could serve current and future business needs across admin, configuration, reporting, billing and AI, with enough coherence that different product teams could extend it without fragmenting it.
The Work
Platform design at enterprise depth
The Admin work was the heaviest: building an entirely new configuration app for the Atlas platform, covering user management, permissions, billing, workflow studio, reporting, WFM and AI products. Every surface had to hold up under enterprise procurement scrutiny.
Talkdesk Live was a parallel track: improving dashboard layout responsiveness and adaptability, designing a new alert and notifications centre, and creating an onboarding flow that let supervisors configure their workspace without relying on support. Alongside the product work, I co-led a 60-person remote workshop on design org challenges, and presented Talkdesk's design process at the company's annual keynote.
Product design community workshops
Problem. Talkdesk's design organisation grew tenfold in three years. Process and communication started to strain. Product consistency and quality suffered under the pace of growth.
Solution. Surface the organisation's real problems, then co-define drivers and actionable solutions with the team itself. A clear workshop structure made it possible to facilitate and lead 60 designers remotely.
Three calls that shaped the outcome
Treat the configuration interface as a product, not a settings page
The tendency was to build admin as an afterthought to the main product. Repositioning CX Cloud Admin as the thing enterprise buyers actually evaluate shifted how engineering and PM prioritised it, and how we designed it.
Reporting for the reader, not the configurator
A reporting dashboard is a tool for decision-making. We stripped everything that existed to prove the tool's capability and rebuilt around what the reader needed to act on. Simpler, faster, more trusted.
Invest in the org as much as the product
At this stage and scale, the quality ceiling of a design organisation is set by its processes, not its headcount. Contributing to how we hired, onboarded, and developed designers was not a distraction from the product work. It was the long-term product work.
Enterprise scale, measurable shift
The platform surfaces moved from sources of enterprise churn to proof points in renewal conversations. Design was represented at the company's annual keynote for the first time.
What this changed
Talkdesk showed me what scale demands. At that size, design quality is a systemic property. It comes from the standard you set as a manager, the bar you hold in review, the culture you build in the team. Individual heroics don't scale. Systems do.
The quality ceiling of a design organisation is set by its processes, not its headcount.