Before
The wrong user was driving the design
SailPoint's IdentityNow platform helped companies, banks, healthcare systems, large enterprises, and government agencies manage who had access to what. Access reviewers touch the system a few times a year. But a smaller group of admins lived in it every day.
The platform had been built almost entirely around the reviewers. The admins doing the real heavy lifting were using a system that hadn't meaningfully evolved in years.
When an admin needed to configure a new source connector, the system dropped them into a blank form with every possible field displayed at once. No guidance. No help. You either already knew what you were doing, or you called support.
Underneath that, the source area was owned by 7+ engineering teams with different priorities and no shared design standards. Most had inherited responsibility from managers who'd built pieces of it years earlier. Nobody was really paying attention to it.
What I did
Four phases, one foundation
Phase 1 · 2
Setup Wizard + Configuration
The platform's first guided onboarding flow. Replaced the blank form with a step-by-step process, relevant fields only, and documentation embedded inline. Built on a component sub-library that scales across all 200+ connectors.
Phase 3
Monitoring
Admins had no way to track sync status or catch errors early. Redesigned source view pages to surface data health with live labels, warnings, and summaries, shifting from CSV exports to in-product visibility.
Phase 4
Dashboards (In Progress at Departure)
Live dashboards showing aggregation trends, health summaries, and recommended actions across all sources. The earlier phases made this possible.
Throughout
Team Consolidation
When it became clear 7+ teams nominally owned this feature but most had never actively built for it, I said the obvious thing out loud. Others saw it too. Ownership consolidated from 7+ teams to 3.
Impact
From support calls to self-service
200+
Connectors supported by a single reusable component system
7→3
Engineering teams consolidated around the feature
4
Phases shipped across two years of sustained design leadership
For Admins
Setup went from an undocumented process requiring a support call to a guided, self-service experience. Support mentions of connector issues dropped noticeably, confirmed through customer interviews.
For Engineering
Reusable, design-reviewed patterns for all 200+ connectors. No more starting from scratch for each new connector type. Separating setup from monitoring reduced misconfiguration risk and clarified ownership.