B2B SaaS · Senior Product Designer · Jun 2024 – Apr 2025
Max Retail
How I led design across three product teams as the sole designer — building a design system from scratch and helping the company grow from Series A to B.
Role
Senior Product Designer (sole designer)
Timeline
June 2024 – April 2025
Team
20 engineers across 3 product teams
Key outcome
632 → 1,400 monthly active users
Background
Max Retail is a B2B SaaS platform for retail operations. I was headhunted to join as the sole designer during an inflection point — the company was growing fast, needed to scale their product across multiple teams, and had no design infrastructure in place.
Over 10 months, I led design across 10 major projects, collaborated with 20 engineers across 3 product teams, and built the foundation for how Max Retail approaches design — from individual components to cross-team consistency.
The challenge
Joining a fast-scaling company as its only designer meant three parallel challenges:
- No design system: Three product lines with inconsistent UI — different button styles, spacing systems, and component patterns across each team.
- High-friction onboarding: New users spent an average of 9 minutes on onboarding — creating a significant barrier to activation and contributing to churn.
- Speed vs. quality tension: Engineering moved fast. Design needed to keep up without shipping inconsistent experiences.
What I built
I approached this as three parallel workstreams that reinforced each other:
Workstream 01
Self-serve onboarding redesign
Audited the full onboarding flow, identified friction points through session recordings and user interviews, and redesigned the experience to be self-serve. Reduced completion time from 9 minutes to 3 minutes — a 67% improvement — which directly supported user growth and reduced support load.
Workstream 02
Max Retail's first design system
Built a comprehensive design system from scratch covering components, spacing, typography, color, and interaction patterns. Standardized UI across all 3 product lines, cutting inconsistencies by 40% and achieving full WCAG 2.1 accessibility compliance — making every new feature accessible from day one.
Workstream 03
Cross-team design leadership
Embedded into 3 product teams simultaneously, collaborating with 20 engineers across 10 major projects. Created shared design rituals — critique sessions, handoff standards, and documentation practices — so design thinking scaled beyond just me.
Results
1,400
monthly active users — up from 632 at time of joining
−67%
onboarding time (9 minutes → 3 minutes)
−40%
UI inconsistencies after design system launch
The design system also achieved full WCAG 2.1 accessibility compliance across all 3 product lines — a first for the company.