Product Design

MyGeotab

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

Led design execution across multiple high-impact workstreams to reduce cognitive friction, improve consistency, and enable teams to ship safely at scale — while preserving mission-critical workflows throughout.

500K+ operators worldwide4 parallel workstreamsPlatform-wide impact
Fleet operator working with Geotab's vehicle tracking platform

Client
Geotab
Year
2020–2023
Role
Design Lead
Platform
Enterprise Fleet SaaS

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.

High cognitive load at scale

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

Deeply embedded workflows

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

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.

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.

Platform audit mapping UX debt across Geotab features 01

Platform Paper Cuts

Identified and addressed high-frequency, cross-cutting usability issues — shifting culture toward fixing fundamentals safely and continuously.

Geotab navigation structure before redesign 02

Navigation & IA Consistency

Established flexible, reusable IA and navigation patterns that prioritised predictability — lowering decision fatigue and reducing onboarding cost.

Geotab information architecture diagram 03

Dashboard & System-Wide Patterns

Defined shared patterns for high-traffic surfaces, aligning interaction models across teams — reducing rework through shared system thinking.

Geotab platform design operating model overview 04

Operating Model & Autonomy

Shifted from gatekeeper to enabling infrastructure — embedding shared standards that allowed teams to ship confidently without central approval.

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.