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
- Managing 6 designers directly, and a key contributor to scaling the design org from 6 to 60+ during tenure
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.
Problem. Legacy admin and call center configuration experience, new Atlas platform functional and visual requirements.
Solution. Create a new admin and configuration app that could serve the new Atlas platform, focusing on the new user management and permissions system, billing, workflow studio, reporting, WFM, and AI products.
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.
Inside Talkdesk 2021
Product design process at Talkdesk
Presentation at Inside Talkdesk 2021, focused on sharing and giving visibility to Talkdesk product design process and organization, its drivers, tools and systems.
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.
Workshop facilitation and documentation
Use of Double Diamond design model to structure the workshops sessions, process and outcome.
Product Design - Community drivers
After the first session we converged all insights into 4 key drivers - Culture, Collaboration, Knowledge and Consistency. On the second session, we co-defined action points to all the drivers and assigned owners to each one so we could track and measure its status.
Three calls that shaped the outcome
Treat the admin and configuration interface as a product
Not a settings page, not an afterthought. It's what enterprise buyers actually evaluate.
A reporting dashboard is a tool for decision-making
We stripped out what just 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 doesn't scale with headcount. It scales with the standards you build into the team.
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
The quality ceiling of a design organisation is set by its culture and processes, not its headcount.
- At that scale, 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.