High informational density
30–50% slower
GfK's legacy DataOS couldn't scale with the business. The redesign came down to three decisions.
Analysts across 34 countries had moved onto spreadsheets to work around the system. The brief was to replace the workaround. The decisions were about scope, governance, and validation — and each one set up a constraint the next had to fit inside.
↓ 20% rework
01 — Scope
Full system redesign, or lean MVP across two journeys.
Monolithic system across 34 countries, every part had a constituency, full redesign politically expensive, modular refactor risked giving every team something and no one enough.
A lean MVP covering Load Definition Management and Standard Compensation Management. Every other candidate flow scored 0–100 on Task Throughput Impact, bottom half deprioritised.
Remove unused features and nail two user journeys, standard templates and ad-hoc compensations, so teams can work faster without spreadsheets.
02 — Governance
Build first and convince the org, or stand up the migration owners first.
Replacing a monolithic system needs an internal owner with the authority to migrate to it. Without that, even a working MVP gets relegated to a side tool. Adoption-after-launch and stakeholder roadshows are slower and more political than they appear on paper.
UX design facilitated a cross-region working group with a clear mandate, set up before design started. The group decided what stayed, what got rebuilt, and what got cut — and carried the migration through.
- SMEs across data-in / coding / enrichment / data-out
- Specialists across US, EMEA, APAC, LATAM, India, Poland, Philippines
No guided workflow
40% rework
Unclear error signalling
25% late issues
Low context visibility
errors only after final QA
03 — Validation
Validate after release, or test pre-build with an alpha gate.
Enterprise tools usually validate post-release through analytics and support tickets. With offshore teams in the loop, post-release feedback is slow and expensive to act on. Moderated testing scaled poorly across regions.
Hybrid testing pre-build (Maze for behaviour, surveys for perception). Findings fed back into working group's prioritisation. Alpha gate held the rollout: no wider release without 10/10 representative users completing tasks unaided.
84%
Task completion
70%
Ease-of-use
100%
Alpha gate
Rework down 20%. The MVP is now the standard tool across three regional teams, with phased rollout in progress.
The working group continues to govern the next migration phase, with offshore validation joining the renewed system in the next quarter.