Transforming a 30-Year Legacy Product Through Strategic UX Leadership
Overview
Role: Lead UX Designer | UX Strategy & Research Lead
Timeline: 2016-2017
Company: PROS (B2B SaaS Revenue Management)
Team: 2 Product Managers, 1 UX Researcher, UX Designer (me)
Context & Challenge
Business challenge
PROS's flagship revenue management application, O&D (Origins & Destinations), faced an existential threat. Built in 1985 and dependent on Adobe Flash, the product was losing competitive advantage as Adobe announced Flash's end-of-life in 2017. Beyond the technology constraint, PROS's pivot to cloud-based perpetual licensing required a complete platform transformation to reach price-sensitive airlines that couldn't afford traditional on-premise solutions.
The stakes: A full application reconfiguration affecting PROS's core revenue stream and market position in the airline revenue management industry.
Strategic Approach
Establishing User-Centered Design as Product Strategy
Rather than approach this as a "lift and shift" redesign, I recognized an opportunity to fundamentally transform PROS's product development process. The existing approach relied on external SMEs rather than actual end-users, creating a disconnect between product assumptions and user reality.
My strategic intervention:
Championed ethnographic research investment by influencing Product leadership through bimonthly alignment meetings
Positioned UX discovery as de-risking strategy rather than cost center
Secured buy-in for worldwide customer research tour by demonstrating ROI potential
Established user-centered design as prerequisite for platform migration decisions
Impact: Shifted organizational mindset from technology-first to user-first product strategy.
Discovery & Research Phase
Research methods
We traveled across the globe talking to customers in Europe, Asia, and Oceana. Working with the UX Researcher we planned an in-depth ethnographic study where we observed user completing their work and conducted interviews to ask specific questions. We were focus to learn about:
Persona Development — Analyst backgrounds, goals, behaviors, and motivations
Ecosystem Mapping — Understanding organizational structures and decision hierarchies
Workflow Analysis — Resources and processes for accomplishing key objectives
Pain Point Identification — Usability issues and job-level challenges
Opportunity Assessment — Scalable improvements that support critical tasks
Critical Strategic Insights
Insight 1: Consistent Cross-Organization Workflows
Contrary to PROS tribal knowledge, analysts across different airlines followed remarkably similar workflows. This discovery invalidated the existing "everything accessible everywhere" navigation approach and revealed opportunity for workflow-optimized information architecture.
Strategic implication: Design could optimize for common workflows rather than maximum flexibility, reducing cognitive load and training costs.
Insight 2: Trust Deficit and Offline Workarounds
Users maintained parallel filing systems and offline tools to validate and document decisions, revealing fundamental trust issues with the application's data presentation and decision support.
Strategic implication: Design must prioritize transparency, auditability, and confidence-building features to drive adoption.
Insight 3: Analysts Spend Minimal Time in PROS UI
The application served as a checkpoint rather than a continuous work environment, indicating need for efficiency-focused design that respects limited attention.
Strategic implication: Optimize for speed and pattern recognition rather than feature discovery.
Business outcome: Research insights transformed product strategy from "feature parity migration" to "workflow transformation opportunity," securing executive commitment to UX-led redesign.
Information Architecture Strategy
The Navigation Challenge
Research revealed a fundamental IA problem: the existing right-rail navigation provided access to 100+ screens but didn't support the discovered consistent workflow pattern. Users needed both high-level market analysis and deep-dive capabilities without losing context.
Strategic Solution Process
Design Decision Rationale:
Since users all thought and communicated that markets (Houston to Miami) is the most important object to traverse the O&D data. I came up with the idea of organizing the navigation by markets. The problem is it needed to be dynamic because users are assigned specific markets. I created a two level dynamic tab navigation that provides context of what you viewed in the past while focusing the user on what matters the most, their markets.
Prototype Validation:
We recognized the advanced navigation design and knew Engineering would push back. We knew that we would need customer feedback that supports the value of the feature. I decided to build a Axure prototype to gather feedback from users on the navigation.
Cross-Functional Design Leadership
Facilitating Strategic Alignment
I led multiple collaborative design workshops using Crazy 8's methodology to synthesize research insights into actionable design directions. This approach served multiple strategic objectives:
Team Alignment: United Product Managers, Engineers, and Designers around shared understanding of user needs rather than feature lists
Idea Synthesis: Combined diverse perspectives to generate innovative solutions (e.g., heat map visualization for availability deviation emerged from collaborative ideation)
Stakeholder Buy-in: Created ownership and investment in design direction through participatory process
Risk Reduction: Validated concepts internally before committing development resources
Outcome: Workshop produced workflow-tailored market analysis approach that became foundation for entire redesign, with full cross-functional team alignment.
Outcome: Workshop produced workflow-tailored market analysis approach that became foundation for entire redesign, with full cross-functional team alignment.
High-Fidelity Prototyping for Strategic Validation
Technical Approach
Built complex Axure RP prototypes that dynamically applied heat map visualizations based on Excel data integration. While technically challenging, this approach delivered critical strategic value:
Stakeholder Confidence: Executive team could experience workflow transformation before development commitment
Development Risk Reduction: Engineering team identified technical constraints early in design phase
Customer Validation: Prototype enabled user testing with realistic data scenarios
Strategic Choice: Invested in high-fidelity prototyping to de-risk a multi-million dollar platform migration by validating assumptions before code was written.
Validating Strategic Design Decisions
To validate our workflow-centered redesign approach, I partnered with our UX Researcher to design and conduct usability testing with 24 revenue analysts across 4 airline customers using the high-fidelity Axure prototype. I designed the task scenarios to test critical design decisions, while the researcher facilitated sessions. Participants completed realistic market analysis tasks, confirming that the new information architecture aligned with their mental models and significantly reduced navigation friction.
What we were trying to learn:
If users understand the new navigation design
Could users find the different charts and graphs that they use daily
Feedback about the market focused experience
General user responses and concerns
What we learned
Positive findings:
The market focus was a major improvement
We observed users moving back and forth through the pages without issues
Users enjoyed the new style of O&D and felt it was modern
Surprises:
Users thought the prototype was real
We had several users question if the heatmap would provide enough detail when actual data was present
Organizational & Cultural Impact
Transforming Product Development Process
This project established precedent for user-centered design at PROS:
Before: Requirements gathered from external SMEs, no user contact, technology-driven decisions
After: Research-validated strategies, cross-functional workshops, user-informed prioritization
Cultural Shift: Demonstrated that UX discovery generates strategic insights, not just interface improvements
Long-term Impact: Established research and collaborative design as standard practice for PROS product development
Key Learnings & Strategic Insights
What Made This Successful
Collaborative Leadership
Used workshops to create shared ownership of design direction, reducing implementation frictionStrategic Framing
Positioned research as business risk mitigation rather than design preference, securing executive buy-inEvidence-Based Design
Let research insights drive decisions, building credibility for UX's strategic roleSystems Thinking
Leveraged design system to scale impact across 100+ screens efficientlyCross-Functional Partnership
Partnered with Product and Engineering as strategic equals, not service providers