PowerStack: A Unified Client Portal

Overview

Role: UX & Product designer on the team, with end-to-end involvement Timeline: Discovery through launch and post-launch iteration What it is: A single, branded portal that gives every client one front door to all of the apps they license

PowerStack is a Digital Experience Platform: one branded portal that consolidates access to a suite of licensed apps behind a single sign-in and a tile-based dashboard. Clients sign in once and land on a dashboard showing, at a glance, which apps are active and which are available to upgrade into. Behind it sits an admin view that lets staff provision accounts and assign access without engineering involvement. It is multi-tenant by design, with role-aware navigation for different kinds of users. I helped build it from the ground up, and my responsibilities grew with each phase of the work.

The Challenge

The problem

Before PowerStack, the product surface was fragmented. Clients were licensing multiple tools but logging in to each one separately, with different credentials, different branding, and no shared sense that this was one company's platform. Internally, provisioning a new client across products meant manual coordination across teams. Externally, customers could not easily see what they owned, what they did not, or how the pieces fit together.

The strategic risk was real. A fragmented surface caps account expansion, slows onboarding, and leaves upsell opportunities invisible. PowerStack's job was to collapse all of that into a single coherent experience and, in doing so, set up the architecture for future monetization, self-service sign-up, and analytics.

This is the kind of product where the design and the business strategy are the same artifact. A unified portal is not just a UX improvement; it is the substrate that makes account expansion and self-service possible.

My Role, by Phase

1. Discovery & research

I ran stakeholder interviews across the company to map exactly where the multi-login, multi-product friction was hurting us, both for customers and internally. I built journey maps and friction audits that traced a client's path from sign-up to daily use across the existing product silos. That research turned an abstract "we should unify the products" intuition into a concrete scope: one portal, passwordless sign-in, role-based access, app tiles with status, and admin provisioning.

2. Scoping

I authored the MVP scope and the user-story sheet that became the working contract with engineering. I defined the role model (a staff super-admin, a client-side admin, and an end user) and the information architecture that flows from it.

3. Design

I produced wireframes and mockups, then interactive prototypes that we used to pressure-test flows with stakeholders before any code was written. The core patterns came out of this stage:

• The tile dashboard and the active vs. inactive status model
• Role-aware navigation for each kind of user
• The admin client-management surface for provisioning and access
• The passwordless sign-in flow, with optional single sign-on
• An upsell path on inactive tiles, turning a dead end into an opportunity

4. Build & iteration with engineering

I partnered closely with engineering through implementation. I was not writing production code, but I was in the loop on every iteration: reviewing builds against intent, catching where the build drifted from the user story, and owning the trade-off calls when downstream constraints forced compromises.

5. Post-launch CX work

After launch, the work shifted from shipping to listening. I embedded with the Customer Success team to convert real pain points into product changes, and we instrumented the customer journey proactively, watching for friction at known seams like first login, inactive-tile education, and account switching, so we could fix problems before they became tickets. Several onboarding and upsell iterations came directly out of that loop.

Results & Impact

The product launched and was adopted. Framed honestly as qualitative outcomes:

• Replaced fragmented per-product logins with a single branded entry point.
• Gave clients an at-a-glance view of what they own and what they can upgrade into.
• Streamlined internal provisioning, so a new client can be stood up and given access without engineering.
• Established an architecture ready for future billing, self-service sign-up, usage analytics, and white-label theming.
• Built a feedback loop with Customer Success that converted customer pain into shipped iterations.

Key Takeaways

What this work shows

• Strategic product thinking: connecting UX decisions to monetization and account-expansion strategy.
• Platform thinking: collapsing a fragmented product surface into one coherent experience.
• Information architecture and role modeling for multi-tenant software.
• End-to-end range: research and scoping, interaction design, engineering partnership, and post-launch product work.

What I am proudest of

The parts where the research, the scope, and the design choices all line up against the same strategic frame. The decisions that look like UX decisions, what counts as a tile, what active vs. inactive means, how an admin invites a user, are also the decisions that determine whether the company can scale a multi-product motion. Getting those to agree is the whole job.

PowerStack is where I learned, in the most concrete way, that good platform UX and good business strategy are not two conversations. They are one.