Forge: Redesigning the Enterprise Design Review Experience
A product management case study — from discovery research through redesign, roadmap, and projected impact — for a fictional enterprise design review platform with a critical adoption problem.
The Product
Forge is an enterprise SaaS platform used by manufacturing and consumer product companies to manage design reviews, stakeholder approvals, and revision tracking. It sits at the intersection of design tooling and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) — where creative decisions meet engineering constraints and business sign-off.
The platform has strong enterprise contracts and deep integration with CAD and ERP systems. But it has a serious problem: adoption is collapsing. Seat utilization dropped from 74% to 41% over 18 months. Designers avoid it, stakeholders can't navigate it, and the approval workflow that justifies the product's existence is buried under layers of complexity.
My Role
VP Product, brought in to diagnose the adoption failure and lead the redesign from research through launch. Responsible for strategy, prioritization, cross-functional alignment, and outcome measurement.
Research & Discovery
Before proposing solutions, the team needed to understand why adoption was failing. We conducted 24 user interviews across 6 client organizations, analyzed 90 days of session telemetry, and ran a competitive audit against 5 alternative workflows teams had adopted informally.
Key Findings
- Navigation collapse. 67% of users couldn't locate the approval workflow within 3 clicks. The information architecture had grown organically over 4 years without restructuring — what started as a clean hierarchy had become a maze of nested menus and redundant paths.
- Context switching penalty. Designers had to leave their primary tools (Solidworks, Figma, Adobe CC) to upload, annotate, and submit work for review. Every review cycle required 12+ minutes of file management before any actual review happened.
- Notification blindness. Reviewers received an average of 34 notifications per day from Forge, with no priority differentiation. 78% of review requests were ignored for 48+ hours, creating project bottlenecks attributed to the tool rather than the people.
- Role confusion. The same interface served designers uploading work, engineers reviewing specifications, and VPs approving milestones. None of these users shared the same mental model, yet all saw the same dashboard.
- Shadow workflows. 5 of 6 client organizations had developed informal workarounds using Slack, email attachments, and shared drives — routing around Forge entirely for day-to-day reviews and only using it for compliance documentation.
User Personas
Three distinct user types emerged from research, each with fundamentally different needs, workflows, and definitions of success.
Heuristic Evaluation
A structured evaluation against Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics revealed systemic issues across the platform. The six highest-severity findings:
Proposed Redesign
The redesign is organized around a single principle: every user should reach their primary action within 2 clicks of login. This required restructuring the information architecture around roles rather than features.
Role-Based Dashboards
Three distinct entry experiences replace the universal dashboard. Each surfaces only the information and actions relevant to the user's role, with progressive disclosure for deeper functionality. Designers see their active projects and submission status. Engineers see pending reviews with change summaries. VPs see a decision queue with recommendations.
Approval Flow Redesign
The approval workflow moves from a buried settings menu to a persistent status bar visible on every screen. Pending approvals surface with context — what changed, who's waiting, what's the deadline. One-click approval from the notification itself, including a mobile-optimized approval card for VP users.
Version Comparison Engine
A side-by-side diff view for design iterations with overlay, slider, and annotation tools. Engineers can review changes visually without opening separate files. Change summaries auto-generate from revision metadata, highlighting what's new, modified, or removed.
Smart Notifications
Notification triage engine with three priority tiers: action required (you're blocking someone), FYI (relevant to your work), and archive (system updates). Digest mode available for non-urgent items. Critical notifications persist until acknowledged.
Streamlined Upload
Upload reduced from 7 fields to 2 — file and project. All other metadata auto-populates from project context, file type detection, and user history. Drag-and-drop from file system or direct integration with design tool plugins.
Prioritized Roadmap
Scope discipline is the hardest part of any redesign. The roadmap is structured around impact on the core adoption metric — seat utilization — with each phase building on validated outcomes from the previous one.
- Role-based dashboards — three distinct entry experiences replacing the universal view.
- Approval status bar — persistent, visible on every screen, one-click approve.
- Upload simplification — reduce to 2 fields with auto-population.
- Notification priority tiers — action required vs. FYI vs. archive.
- Version comparison engine — side-by-side diff with overlay and annotations.
- Mobile approval cards — responsive approval flow for VP users.
- Design tool plugins — direct submission from Solidworks, Figma, Adobe CC.
- Smart notification digests — ML-driven priority scoring based on user behavior.
- Automated change summaries — AI-generated revision notes from file diffs.
- Analytics dashboard — review cycle time, bottleneck identification, team velocity.
Projected Impact
Targets are based on benchmark data from comparable enterprise UX redesigns and validated against the specific friction points identified in discovery research.
The Product Worked. The Experience Didn't.
Forge's adoption failure wasn't a technology problem — it was a design problem. The platform had the right capabilities but the wrong experience. Users didn't need more features; they needed fewer barriers between intent and action.
The redesign applies the same principle that governs great industrial design: every element earns its place, every interaction serves a purpose, and the system respects how people actually work rather than how an architect imagined they would.
The most expensive feature in any enterprise product is the one that makes users avoid the product entirely.