Modernizing Pricing Operations

The pricing team at a Fortune 100 beverage company ran their entire operation on a 15-year-old Windows desktop app. Analysts had built up years of workarounds: side spreadsheets, sticky notes, a phone-a-friend network for the screens nobody fully understood. New hires needed six weeks to become productive.

Error rates on pricing submissions sat around 12%, which translated to real margin leakage at their volume. Our mandate was to replace the tool without disrupting live pricing operations across 8 regional teams.

I spent the first six weeks embedded with analysts in three regional offices while our researcher ran remote sessions with the other five. We synthesized together every Friday. One number set the tone for the whole project: the legacy app had 47 screens, and analysts regularly used 11 of them.

The bigger finding was structural. The tool forced a linear flow onto work that isn't linear. Analysts jump between accounts, compare historical pricing, and check constraints all at once — the app made them do it one screen at a time. So they did the real thinking in Excel and used the app for data entry.

Co-design workshops came first. I put analysts from every region in front of whiteboards and asked them to sketch workflows, not interfaces. West Coast teams organized their world by account. Midwest teams thought in product categories. Both were valid, so the architecture had to support both instead of picking a winner.

We iterated through three significant pivots in usability testing. The breakthrough was a workspace model that let analysts pin multiple pricing views side by side, the way traders use terminals. That idea didn't come from a brainstorm — it came from watching an analyst tape printed spreadsheets to the edge of her monitor.

As the lead, I spent as much time aligning people as pushing pixels: weekly design reviews with engineering, monthly demos to the steering committee, and one-on-ones with regional managers who were nervous about retraining their teams.

We shipped a React single-page application built around configurable workspaces. Analysts arrange pricing views to match how they actually work, save presets per task type, and share configurations with teammates.

I walked in assuming a UI modernization project. It was an information architecture problem wearing a UI mask — the legacy app wasn't ugly, it was structurally wrong for the work.

The co-design sessions changed the trajectory. When I stopped designing for analysts and started designing with them, solution quality jumped. And in enterprise software, adoption is the metric that matters: a beautiful tool nobody uses loses to an ugly one everyone relies on.