xTrade
Four legacy placement systems collapsed into one configurable platform. I went from lead designer to product owner of a 17-person team because the problem needed both.
- £1.5–2Msaved a year
- ~£200MGWP processed
- ~1,000enterprise users
Luka Dadiani
Product manager and senior designer. London.
Ten years making regulated, legacy-bound software feel obvious.
The hardest products are the ones nobody wants to design. Regulated. Legacy-bound. Full of edge cases, where an edge case is a satellite or a fine-art shipment crossing a border.
I have spent ten years there. Seven as a designer, the last four running a specialty risk placement platform in the London market: around £200M of premium a year, a thousand brokers, and no patience whatsoever for bad software.
The work is rarely the screen. It was the sixty parcels I posted across the UK to find out which courier actually delivers. The config tool I prototyped because configuration, not design, was the thing capping our growth. The dashboard I argued us out of building.
Find the constraint limiting the system, not the screen in front of you.
Kill the features that do not earn their complexity. Stay close enough to the craft to be useful in the Figma file and the sprint board on the same day.
Then ship it, and go and measure whether it worked.
Placement platforms, redemption at national scale, telematics, and the dashboards a £3B business ran on.
Four legacy placement systems collapsed into one configurable platform. I went from lead designer to product owner of a 17-person team because the problem needed both.
A redemption platform for Google, LG, Philips and Samsung. I posted sixty parcels around the UK to pick the courier, then defended our tested inputs against Material Design.
A telematics app re-platformed for ANWB. I argued for one white-label build instead of an app per insurer, and swapped trip scoring for coaching.
An £800M business became £3B by acquisition, and every acquisition brought its own dashboard. One visual language, one glossary, one export flow across Finance, HR and Broking.