Product Design Systems

MyGeotab

Incrementally modernising and scaling a complex, legacy platform without breaking customer workflows

MyGeotab is a large-scale enterprise platform used daily by fleets to manage vehicles, drivers, safety, and operations. Over years of growth, the platform accumulated significant UX debt across hundreds of features and teams. This work focused on reducing cognitive friction, improving consistency, and enabling teams to ship safely at scale — while preserving mission-critical workflows throughout.

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Context & Constraints

MyGeotab operated as a fragmented ecosystem of legacy patterns, overlapping features, and distributed ownership. Small usability issues compounded across the platform — slowing users down, increasing support burden, and eroding confidence for customers and internal teams alike. The scale and complexity of the platform ruled out any wholesale redesign. Change had to be incremental, defensible, and resilient to continuous delivery.

Key Constraints

01

High cognitive load at scale

Inconsistent patterns across hundreds of features created compounding friction — slowing users down and eroding trust across the platform.

02

Deeply embedded workflows

A large surface area with mission-critical workflows meant any change carried significant risk — requiring careful, targeted intervention over broad redesign.

03

No viable big-bang redesign

Enterprise-scale risk, continuous delivery expectations, and distributed ownership ruled out wholesale change. Progress had to be incremental and defensible.

04

Influence without authority

Design had to earn credibility across teams with separate ownership — shifting from gatekeeper to a shared resource that teams wanted to engage with.

Workstreams

Four high-leverage workstreams that improved quality, consistency, and delivery speed incrementally — without disrupting existing customer workflows.

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Platform Paper Cuts

Identified and addressed high-frequency, cross-cutting usability issues appearing repeatedly across features and teams. Surfaced systemic UX debt hidden from any single product view — shifting culture toward fixing fundamentals and demonstrating that meaningful improvement could happen safely and continuously.

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Navigation & IA Consistency

Established flexible, reusable IA and navigation patterns that prioritised predictability without enforcing rigid uniformity. Lowered decision fatigue, reduced onboarding cost, and enabled faster delivery without fragmenting the platform.

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Dashboard & System-Wide Patterns

Defined shared patterns for high-traffic surfaces, aligning interaction models and behaviour across teams. Reduced rework, improved onboarding for designers and engineers, and increased long-term maintainability through shared system thinking.

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Operating Model & Autonomy

Redesigned how design operated at platform scale — shifting from gatekeeper to enabling infrastructure. Embedded shared standards that allowed teams to ship confidently without central approval, cutting red tape while protecting long-term platform health.

Role & Ownership

Design Lead

  • Led design execution across multiple high-impact initiatives while shaping how design operated at platform scale
  • Enabled designers and teams to make better decisions independently — through shared patterns, guidance, and standards rather than central approval
  • Cross-team influence and alignment across distributed ownership, with direct design ownership over critical platform surfaces
  • Mentorship and capability development to support scale, consistency, and design quality as the team grew

Outcome & Impact

Incremental by design — compounding over time into platform-level improvement

Reduced friction across workflows

Day-to-day workflows improved without disruptive change to mission-critical processes — fewer issues driven by confusion and unpredictability.

Cultural shift toward quality

Demonstrated that meaningful improvement could happen safely and continuously — shifting team norms around what good design quality looks like.

Faster delivery through shared patterns

Teams shipped confidently without central approval, supported by clearer decision-making frameworks and reduced rework across surfaces.

Reduced UX inconsistency at scale

Alignment across high-traffic surfaces and navigation reduced onboarding cost and slowed long-term UX debt accumulation.

Platform Able To Scale Without Increasing Debt

Strengthened MyGeotab's ability to evolve as a coherent, resilient platform — supporting long-term growth without compromising usability or trust.