FROM EXECUTION TO INFLUENCE: DESIGN AT EO

EO is a B2B platform serving film festivals and filmmakers, supporting workflows such as submissions, promotions, payments, and revenue tracking. As an early-stage product, EOflix evolved quickly—but not always coherently.

Design decisions were often highly subjective and solution-driven, influenced directly by leadership preferences, built on undocumented legacy logic, and fragmented across user roles and business goals.

In this environment, the core challenge was not UI execution, but how to make design a trusted decision-making tool within a system full of ambiguity.

I realized early that most conflicts around “design feedback” were not about visuals—but about misaligned mental models. Different stakeholders were optimizing for different things.

Without a shared structure, discussions defaulted to opinions. The real design problem became: How might design create clarity and alignment across fragmented perspectives—before debating solutions?

1. Turning ambiguity into structured experience systems

As design owner, I stepped into a broader leadership role of this product by taking ownership of how experience problems were identified, discussed, and resolved—not just how screens were designed.

Experience issues at EOflix were initially addressed reactively and in isolation. To change this, I created and maintained a UX Boom Squad document that systematically captured experience risks, cognitive friction points, and potential user misunderstandings across core flows such as submissions, upgrades, payouts, and dashboards.

I then organized regular UX Boom Squad sessions, inviting PMs and marketing partners to participate in reviewing these risks together. This helped the team move from fixing isolated issues to proactively identifying and preventing experience problems.

2. Using design to align, not to argue

Rather than debating individual solutions, I used design to structure conversations and align perspectives across roles.

I consistently created parallel design variants to surface trade-offs, supported by end-to-end flows, before/after comparisons, and state-based designs. These artifacts grounded discussions in concrete user experience and reduced subjective debate.

This project significantly strengthened my leadership capabilities as a designer. By introducing structured experience frameworks and facilitating cross-functional alignment, I earned the trust of PMs, marketing partners, and leadership.

Over time, design shifted from a reactive execution role to a trusted voice in decision-making. Experience discussions became more proactive, structured, and outcome-driven, and design was increasingly brought into conversations earlier in the product lifecycle.

This project established design not just as a delivery function, but as a strategic partner within the team.