EnterprisePlatform VisionDesign SystemB2B SaaS

Brightly

Design direction for a $1.575B acquisition.

Brightly was acquired by Siemens for $1.575B. Before the deal closed, the platform vision was previewed to existing customers: 74% of conference attendees expressed excitement about the future product direction, 36% said they were more likely to renew. User testing on the functional prototypes saw time on dashboard pages increase 5×. NPS verbatims, gathered independently, validated the survey findings.

The work behind those signals: vision design across 12 siloed products at Brightly, anchored to a complete corporate rebrand and a major client conference. A new design language. A unified design system and front-end-agnostic component library. North star designs for the integrated portfolio. A transition plan from siloed products to platform.

Three surfaces, three arguments

The hero screens, and the design intention behind each

Three hero surfaces did most of the work of carrying the platform claim. Each was a different argument the vision had to make.

The dashboard was the moment a customer landed in the product and saw all of their work in one place: planned maintenance, team availability, at-risk assets, work orders waiting on triage. The decision was that the dashboard had to be role-based, customizable, actionable, and data-driven. Every part of that list answered a specific complaint customers had raised in the research.

Asset health and suggested actions extended the dashboard's logic. Asset health was the system saying which equipment was likely to fail, on what timeline, with what financial exposure: predicted failure, estimated losses, recommended course of action. Suggested actions was the system proposing the next move with the recommended option marked. Together they collapsed the old workflow (jump between tools, read the data yourself, decide alone) into a single surface where the system did the analysis and the operator made the call.

The design system itself was the third surface. A front-end-agnostic component library, branded and unified, paired with the new corporate design language. Not a documentation site. A working library that any product team could pull from regardless of stack, which is what made the platform claim implementable across 12 different products at once.

Dashboard principles framed as customer answers.

Role-based, customizable, actionable, data-driven. Each principle answered a specific complaint surfaced in the research mix (Pendo analytics, Aha! product feedback, Client Advisory Boards, client visits, internal SME interviews). The principles were not aesthetic. They were arguments back at the field.

Asset health as a three-part decision support surface.

Predicted failure plus estimated losses plus recommended course of action. The three together turn the surface from "data point about a piece of equipment" into "decision the operator can make right now." The pattern propagated through the suggested actions surface and gave the platform a consistent operator-AI relationship across products.

Component library as front-end agnostic.

A unified design system is worth less than a unified component library, because a design system still has to be re-implemented by every product team. The library was built front-end-agnostic so any product, on any stack, in any office, could pull components directly. That is what made the platform claim implementable rather than aspirational.

Hero screens earn their position by showing what the platform claim looks like when a customer scrolls through it. The argument lives in the screens, not next to them.

Twelve silos, one platform vision

What the vision had to compress into a single product story

Brightly had assembled a portfolio of 12 siloed software products serving manufacturing, healthcare, education, and government. The portfolio's strategy said "platform." The user experience said twelve different products under one logo, each with its own dashboard, its own data, its own workflows. Customers were saying it directly: poor landing-page experience, products that did not share datasets, disjointed workflows, no clear expectation for what the future looked like.

Two business events anchored the work. A complete corporate rebrand, which gave the design language room to be redrawn from scratch rather than nudged from where it had been. And a major client conference, which set a deadline that everything had to be ready to show to existing customers in functional prototype form.

As Manager of Product Design at Brightly, I led a team of seven designers distributed across Melbourne, London, Noida, Montreal, and the US. The structural work, the executive presentation, and the case for the reframe were mine. A senior designer on the team paired with me on the visual execution; most of what you would see in the prototypes is their craft. The two halves of the work fit together: the architecture decided what to argue, the visual design decided how to argue it.

The deliverables stacked on each other. A new corporate design language anchored to the rebrand. A unified design system built on top. A front-end-agnostic UI component library any product team could implement against. North star designs for the integrated portfolio. A transition plan from current siloed products to the platform shape. The point of the stack was that each layer made the next one implementable rather than aspirational.

Tie the vision to two business events, not one.

The rebrand gave the design language permission to break with the past. The client conference gave the prototypes a real deadline and a real audience. Anchoring the vision to both meant the work had business justification on two axes, not just one.

Lead the structure, partner on the craft.

Managing a distributed seven-person design team while running the structural and presentation work meant getting clear on what I owned and what others owned. I led the architecture, the systems thinking, and the case to executives. A senior designer led the visual execution. Both halves had to be excellent for the work to be defensible.

A transition plan, not just a destination.

Vision design is easy to dismiss as aspirational. Pairing the North star designs with a transition plan from current products to platform made the work answerable to engineering: here is what we propose, here is how the existing portfolio gets there from where it is.

Strategic narratives say "platform." Design evidence says what the platform actually looks like when a customer clicks through it, what the design language allows, and how the existing products get there.

What the work was for

The Chief Product Officer was happy enough with the work to put the prototypes into multiple high-stakes rooms. They went into board presentations supporting funding requests. They went into the acquisition-stage meetings with Siemens leading up to the deal. Brightly was acquired by Siemens for $1.575B.

The design work did not cause the acquisition. It was the part of the story the acquirer needed to see to evaluate whether the platform claim had design proof underneath the strategic narrative.

Design judgment at the layer above craft is what enterprise design vision actually means. Not making things prettier. Making the strategic claim verifiable before the business commits to it.