The App Modernization Platform
An original request for a short term MVP of a new modernization platform turned into leading and defining long term design strategy and design foundations cross functionally.
HOME
CREATIVE
YEAR
2025 - 2026
ROLE
Design strategy
Product design
Stakeholder management
Cross-team collaboration
User research
TEAM
2 Researchers
2 Product Managers
About the project
This project started as a quick and fast marketplace for internal employees to navigate and learn about MongoDB's current stack of modernization tools for their respective incubators.
After lengthy discussions, design encouraged longer term thinking as there was opportunity here for a platform that not only houses tools, but that allowed employees to trigger and monitor entire modernization efforts from start to end.
Business desire to eventually make this a marketable and external platform for consumer use as fueled this redirection.
Changing product goals with design perspective
My new goal at this very early stage of blue sky design was to spark discussion and ideas around the App Mod Platform (AMP)’s long-term direction and vision.
I wanted the team to align on a greater vision, even as it evolves and changes, to help organize short-term decisions and priorities. Additionally, it will help improve strategy consistency, decision making, and cross-team alignment.
As a product designer, I also created UX foundational assets to help highlight various wants and needs, guiding the team towards that aligned direction.
Explored user flows
Analyzed the current state of the product and identified key pain points or areas of confusion. This was a great asset used towards conversations on why the current user flow does not answer our biggest user needs and how it would be incredibly difficult to scale.
Identified user personas
As a newly formed product organization, there was also great confusion what responsibilities and goals did different users have.
Thus, we conducted 6 internal interviews with various AMP users to identify key personas and validated them with 8 asynchronous user tests.
This lead to the creation of 6 distinct AMP personas. By aligning on our target users and clearly defining their needs, design helped solidify points of reference and provided a foundation for future product and design goals to jump from.
Next steps:
vibe coding and AI
For next steps on thinking about what the user experience would look like for such an impactful platform, I worked with PMs and other designers to explore preliminary ideas. We utilized multiple vibe coding venues and AI chatbot experiences to speed up iteration and onboarding for us and our users.
Learnings
This was a very interesting blue sky experience. Due to a lack of product driven focus, design became very proactive in advocating for a more user driven and longer term vision. It proved highly beneficial to layout the foundations for the ideal user flow and our target user personas in order to influence product and engineering leadership.
