desktop only; responsive in the making

De-risking platform consolidation through strategic design evaluation

UX Strategy for a Company Merge

Nov 2024 – Feb 2025

UX/UI Audit & Implementation Plan

NOTION RELATIONAL DATABASES / FIGMA

TL;DR

Following neuefische-Spiced's merger with a French peer company, leadership wanted to consolidate onto a single platform. I mapped our coaches' real workflows against the partner's system to assess feasibility. My gap analysis revealed that poor UX design was directly causing operational inefficiencies—coaches were compensating with manual workarounds across 6+ tools. I reframed the decision: migrate as-is and inherit those problems, or use the merger as a catalyst to invest in fixing the platform's UX debt first.

Curious? Scroll down for the details…

The Challenge

navigating a merge

When neuefische-Spiced (Germany) merged with its French counterpart, leadership faced a critical decision: consolidate both organizations onto a single platform stack or maintain parallel systems indefinitely. The French side operated on Odyssey/Sina; NF-Spiced had built custom LMS/TMS tools tailored to their coach-led cohort model.

The stakes were high: a failed migration would disrupt operations for hundreds of coaches and students, while maintaining dual systems would perpetuate inefficiency and slow integration.

Leadership needed to know: Could Odyssey realistically support NF-Spiced's workflows without breaking them?

role scope

Senior Product Designer & Service Designer

Sole IC reporting to CPO of merged company
Collaborated with Odyssey/Sina's PM, designer, and lead engineer

Constraints Navigated

Limited engineering bandwidth during merger

Unclear ownership and leadership restructuring
Communication gaps across distributed teams

my strategic approach

what would it take, is it worth it?

As the sole Senior Product Designer reporting to the CPO, I reframed the question from "Can we migrate?" to "What would it take to migrate successfully—and is it worth it?"

Rather than conducting a surface-level UI comparison, I treated this as a service design problem: I mapped the lived reality of NF-Spiced coaches against Odyssey's current capabilities to surface hidden risks and strategic opportunities.

The insight that shaped my approach: Platform adoption isn't just about feature parity—it's about whether the system supports or sabotages real workflows.

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..adoption isn't just about feature parity — it's about whether the system supports or sabotages real workflows.

What I Uncovered

The Hidden Cost of Poor UX

Through workflow mapping and gap analysis, I revealed how Odyssey's design flaws directly caused operational inefficiencies:

Manual workarounds everywhere:

Tasks that should be automated—attendance tracking, feedback consolidation, material distribution—required coaches to manually duplicate work across multiple systems.

Cognitive overload by design:

Inconsistent UI patterns, stacked modals, and unclear status indicators meant coaches spent mental energy fighting the interface instead of supporting students.

Navigation chaos amplified context-switching:

Overcrowded menus and missing breadcrumbs forced coaches to juggle 6+ external tools (Slack, Zoom, Notion, Sheets, Coach Hub) to patch information gaps.

the bottom line

Migrating NF-Spiced onto Odyssey as-is would transfer these inefficiencies to hundreds more coaches, increasing operational costs and risking burnout.

the way forward

the strategic reframe

Rather than deliver a simple "yes/no" feasibility verdict, I repositioned the merger as a catalyst for strategic investment:

The problem wasn't whether to migrate—it was whether leadership was willing to fix Odyssey's UX debt as part of the consolidation.

I framed two paths forward:

Migrate without redesign → Transfer NF-Spiced's proven workflows into a broken system, increasing coach workload and fragmenting operations further.

Use the merger to rebuild → Treat consolidation as an opportunity to invest in Odyssey's UX overhaul, aligning both organizations on stronger foundations and unlocking strategic benefits:

Faster freelance coach onboarding (a key growth direction for NF-Spiced)
Reduced context-switching saving coaches hours weekly
Scalable evaluation workflows cutting manual redundancy

results

impact & outcome

Decision-making clarity

My analysis gave leadership the evidence needed to understand that platform consolidation wasn't a simple IT migration—it was a service delivery risk requiring design investment.

strategic framing

I shifted the conversation from "Can Odyssey work?" to "What investment does success require?"—enabling leadership to make an informed trade-off between short-term cost and long-term operational health.

risk mitigation

By surfacing gaps early (navigation failures, attendance tracking chaos, evaluation bottlenecks), I prevented a rushed migration that would have quietly degraded coach productivity.

project outcome

Consolidation was paused mid-merger due to bandwidth constraints and leadership restructuring. While rollout didn't proceed, my work ensured the decision was data-informed rather than assumption-driven.

Why This Matters

UX Strategy for Organizational Changes

This project demonstrates how UX strategy in mergers goes beyond usability—it becomes a lens to reveal operational risks and enable better decision-making.

In high-stakes organizational change, design isn't just about making interfaces pretty. It's about:

Translating user friction into business risk
Bridging operational reality with platform capabilities
Reframing technical decisions as strategic investments

My comparative approach gave leadership the evidence to avoid a costly mistake—and showed how design can de-risk tool consolidation during organizational turbulence.

reflection & key learning

success, sometimes, is knowing when to stop

Hello, sunk-cost fallacy bias, my old friend…

Sometimes the most valuable design work is showing stakeholders what not to build—and why investing in the right foundation matters more than moving fast.

Made with love by yours truly