As the sole consultant, I ran a 12-week product discovery for a European IoT provider, end to end: 25+ research sessions across internal teams, customers and partners, with AI in every phase, analysing sessions as they happened, holding the full research context and synthesising across 50+ artefacts. The brief was to fix the customer experience of the company's portal, but the UX complaints turned out to be symptoms of deeper causes in how the product was defined and owned. I made the findings tangible with five AI-built concept prototypes and delivered a phased roadmap, presented to the C-level, that fed into the company's strategy update.
Context & Stakes
A portal built as an internal production tool had become the primary customer touchpoint for tens of thousands of buildings.
The client is a European IoT provider. One of its services monitors tens of thousands of buildings, and a single web portal had become the one digital surface where customers and partners use that service: checking status, managing access, responding to alerts.
The portal had been built as an internal production tool and had never been evaluated from the customer's side, yet it had become business-critical. By the time I came in, the experience had grown fragmented, customers and support were absorbing the gaps with manual workarounds that didn't scale, and the product team knew it needed work but had no agreed picture of what to fix first, or why. The brief was practical: run a product discovery to improve the customer experience.
Role & Approach
I ran this solo, owning the whole process: research planning, fieldwork, synthesis, prototyping, the roadmap and the stakeholder facilitation around it. The client's product, operations and commercial leads were my sponsors and my route to customers and partners. The design and synthesis work was mine.
Knowing the technical architecture as well as the design questions helped me earn trust across the sessions: I could follow a customer's surface complaint down to an integration gap or an undefined product model in the same conversation, without handing the technical half to someone else.
The discovery had to fit inside the client's strategy-refresh window, so I kept it to three months, in three loosely overlapping phases: research, synthesis and strategy.
Doing that alone worked because I used AI in every phase, mostly to analyse sessions as they happened and compare each one against everything heard so far. Transcribing an interview went from hours to minutes, and analysing an interview or workshop from days to hours, turning raw sessions into structured analyses. The AI held the full research context, so I could cross-reference findings across every session at once, and it synthesised patterns across more than 50 research artefacts. The same tooling took building the interactive concept prototypes from weeks to days, and drafted the session guides, analyses and deliverables I'd otherwise have queued behind myself.
The bigger gain was depth: because the whole research context was available at once, every design decision could be traced back to a specific piece of customer evidence.
I also wrote my assumptions down before fieldwork as hypotheses to test. The strongest, that the portal's problems would look like UI problems but turn out to be structural, is the one the research validated most clearly.
What I Found
The fieldwork came to more than 25 sessions, spanning internal stakeholders across product, commercial, operations and technical roles and a range of customer and partner organisations, run as semi-structured interviews, focus groups, co-design workshops and live portal walkthroughs. The customers ranged from large organisations managing many sites down to partners and resellers who touch the portal only occasionally. Each session was transcribed within minutes and analysed within hours, so synthesis built continuously instead of waiting for a separate analysis phase.
The surface complaints were the expected ones: confusing navigation, internal jargon, weak feedback after an action, and a constant fallback to phoning someone. The research showed they were symptoms of how the service was wired underneath.
The sharpest pattern was that customers couldn't get a complete picture from the portal alone, so larger customers kept their own records on the side and reconciled by hand whenever the two disagreed. That manual workaround was the emotional low point of the journey, where trust wore away. The other recurring theme was the human layer: customers valued and trusted the support people, and that trust was carrying the service, but it also hid the cost, because support staff were doing by hand the joining-up the systems didn't do.
For the occasional user, the portal costs more effort than the phone call it was supposed to replace.
Problem Definition
"Improve the customer experience" was the brief. The discovery found those experience problems were downstream of a product one: the portal had never been defined or owned as a customer-facing product, so there was no shared picture of what it was for, who it served, or how it fit the wider service.
The reframe mattered because a UX-only engagement would have shipped a nicer interface on top of the same foundations: the same integration gaps, the same role ambiguity, the same manual reconciliation, now hidden behind cleaner screens. Laddering the pain points down through repeated "why" questions surfaced three structural causes: gaps in how systems were integrated, so the portal and a customer's own records drifted apart; an undefined product and segmentation model, so one portal served a large multi-site customer and an occasional reseller the same way; and too much of how the service worked concentrated in a few people instead of in the product.
The product team needed more than a list of fixes: the evidence and the language to make the case for structural work to leadership.
Key Decisions
Solo and three months, scoped to the decision window
Discarded: A larger engagement covering every customer segment in depth, with parallel workstreams and a longer runway. More coverage and more confidence, but at a much higher cost and outside the decision window.
Chosen: A solo three-month discovery focused on the customer and partner segments that mattered most, sized to land inside the client's strategy-refresh cycle with a light footprint on the team's week.
Tradeoff: Less segment depth and no internal team to carry the work forward. I mitigated it by making the internal working group active sponsors, so the findings had owners before the final presentation.
AI-built prototypes as research probes, not a final reveal
Discarded: Polished interactive prototypes held back for a stakeholder reveal at the end of the engagement.
Chosen: Five interactive concept prototypes generated in Lovable from research-grounded briefs, built and iterated in days and used as probes to provoke sharper conversations. Because they were quick to stand up, I could put them in front of stakeholders during the research instead of waiting for a separate design sprint, and they then became the starting point for customer validation.
Tradeoff: They weren't production-ready design, but they turned abstract findings into something stakeholders could click, which moved internal conversations from defensive to generative. "The portal lacks a single source of truth" became "here is what a unified view could look like."
A phased roadmap, not a single redesign brief
Discarded: One comprehensive redesign specification handed straight to engineering.
Chosen: A phased roadmap that sequenced the integration and other foundational work ahead of surface work, so the visible UX improvements would land on solid ground instead of papering over the structural gaps.
Tradeoff: Less to point at than a single redesign, but it matched how the organisation makes investment decisions and let leadership commit step by step.
Solution & Deliverables
What landed:
- A research synthesis, built with AI across 50+ research artefacts and written for a mixed product-and-leadership audience, anchored on personas spanning the customer-facing and internal roles
- A current-state customer journey map identifying the manual-reconciliation step as the trust low point
- A service blueprint exposing where manual work and single-person knowledge hide behind the portal UI
- Process maps and a structured analysis laddering surface complaints down to their structural causes
- Five interactive concept prototypes built in Lovable, used as probes: order tracking, a status dashboard, a site profile, a guided order form and group-based user management
- A phased roadmap sequencing foundations ahead of surface work
- An executive presentation to the C-level, built around the symptoms-versus-structure reframe
Outcomes
The reframe landed with leadership
Leadership engaged with the symptoms-versus-structure framing. It changed the conversation from "which screens do we redesign" to "who owns this as a customer product, and what do we fund first."
Input to the company's strategy update
The discovery named structural dependencies the organisation hadn't spelled out before, and the findings fed into the company's strategy update, with the phased framing adopted as the basis for next steps.
A customer-perspective baseline, in writing
For the first time the portal had a documented reading of the customer experience. The journey map, service blueprint, personas and process maps became reusable reference inside the product team.
Honest Reflection
What surprised me: how much of the "UX problem" was really a service-ownership problem. The portal's confusion about who it served traced straight back to organisational ambiguity about who owned which part of the customer relationship. No redesign could have fixed that, and it took the blueprint to make it visible.
What I learned: using AI across the whole process, instead of on one task, is what let one person cover this much ground in 12 weeks. Used carelessly it adds noise. Used well, with clickable concepts in the middle of the research, it pulls the hard conversations forward to when they're still cheap to have, and keeps the work tied to what customers said.