A hundred problems that turned out to be one.
Problem: An enterprise review response workflow that nobody fully understood — not the internal team, not the customers, not engineering.
What I did: Drew a flow diagram so complex that my PM colleague logged off and handed me the whole thing. That diagram showed me the problem wasn't a list of bugs — it was a system with too many broken decision points.
What happened after: One large redesign, then mostly quiet. A few small tickets per sprint instead of an endless backlog.
Product Designer, end-to-end ownership. I joined the company and was handed this project early. I didn't inherit a clear brief — I inherited Christine's frustration.
My first meeting about this product was with Christine, the lead on the Review Responder team. Christine is the kind of person you'd want handling customer reviews — precise, professional, genuinely careful with her words. She doesn't complain loudly.
That made it worse. I could hear exactly how difficult this system was through how carefully she was choosing not to say it. Every sentence was measured. Every problem was framed diplomatically. And there were a lot of problems.
We also met with the Account team to understand how they onboarded customers. Same story — a different team, the same friction, everywhere.
I opened FigJam and started mapping it all out.
The diagram got very complicated very quickly.
At some point my PM colleague looked at it and logged off. Not metaphorically — they handed me the project and stopped engaging with it. I understand why.
What the diagram showed was that this wasn't a bug list. It was a system with broken decision points throughout — places where the workflow assumed someone would know what to do next, but gave them no information to make that decision. Places where the system's state in one tool didn't match its state in another. Places where the same action meant different things depending on who was doing it.