Internal Developer Platform Console

Reduced infrastructure maintenance time by 90 percent for 500 engineers

Role: Lead Product Designer and Strategy
Timeline: Six months

Engineers were tired of jumping between terminals, cloud consoles, and Jira just to deploy. I turned that pain into an opportunity to build a Golden Path console that unified everything into one place.

About This Project

CHALLENGE

Engineering teams lost 30 percent of their time to toil due to fragmented tools, duplicated scripts, and inconsistent deployment flows.

STRATEGY

I treated engineers like customers, consolidated 4 CLI tools into 1 web-based Golden Path, and created a console that surfaced only the decisions that mattered.

OUTCOME

Spin-up time: 2 days → 15 minutes.
Engineer NPS: +40 points.

THE PROBLEM

500+ engineers.
No frontend team.
Everything had to be buildable by backend developers using MUI components.

We needed a design system that respected reality, not fantasy.

Discovery & Research

Diary studies with ten engineers showed the real blocker:
the mental load of switching between AWS, CLI, Jira, docs, and scripts.

Nobody had one place to understand what was running and where.

Problem Framing & Information Architecture

We reframed the experience from managing servers to managing services.
Services sat at the top. Environments, deployments, and configs hung off them.

This shift simplified mental models and brought clarity to the entire platform.

The Trade-Off

To optimize for speed and safety, we built opinionated software.
We removed about 40 percent of low-use configuration toggles that caused brittle edge cases.

Power users still had escape hatches. New engineers had clarity.

Concept diagram showing the simplified Golden Path from service selection to deployment.

Execution, Expansion, Impact

What We Tested

Once the Golden Path was defined, I built interactive prototypes of the full deployment flow and brought in a Champion Squad of senior engineers plus mid-level developers from multiple teams.

What We Learned

Senior engineers were clear:
The wizard slowed them down.
It added unnecessary steps and felt like training wheels.

Junior engineers had the opposite reaction:
They loved the structure and the guardrails.

Two opposing user groups, both valid, both critical.

The Pivot: The Split View Pattern

Instead of choosing one user type, I merged both needs into a unified layout pattern:

Left
Structured, safe, form-based path for clarity and onboarding.

Right
Direct YAML editing for speed, autonomy, and confidence.

Changes on either side updated the other.
This hybrid model removed friction and became the default for all critical flows across the console.

THE SERVICE HOME BASE

Why We Expanded Beyond Deployments

When the deploy flow stabilized, we took the opportunity to build something engineers had always lacked: a single source of truth for each service.

The new Service Detail hub pulled together:

Live service status
Environment differences
Deployment history
Ownership metadata
Early metrics
Health signals

Instead of hunting through AWS, Jira, GitHub, and internal docs, engineers now had one place to understand a service end-to-end.

This reduced cognitive load, accelerated onboarding, and gave teams a reliable operational center.

Usability test results highlighting task success, time-on-task improvements, and direct engineer quotes.

Usability test results highlighting task success, time-on-task improvements, and direct engineer quotes.

WHAT THIS PROJECT ACTUALLY PROVES

Internal tools are often treated as something engineers simply tolerate.
This project challenged that mindset.

By treating engineers as real customers, mapping mental models, and designing opinionated Golden Paths, we eliminated friction that had silently slowed the entire organisation for years.

This wasn’t a UI facelift.
This was operational infrastructure design.

The console:

Increased product velocity
Reduced dependency on a few “infrastructure gurus”
Established a reusable design pattern for future platform features
Set a new bar for internal experience quality