ARTURO SALEKDesigning products through change
Products don't stay still. The best design work often happens when a product is becoming something different from what it was originally built to be.
Designing through a transition
Every company I've worked at has been at a different stage of product maturity. Across industrial software, enterprise applications, financial products, and enterprise SaaS, I've repeatedly encountered the same situation: the product's current design reflects where the company has been, but the business needs it to support where it's going. You're not designing from a blank canvas. You're designing through a transition.
01 · Starting with constraints
At Brock Solutions, I entered product design through complex enterprise and industrial software. These products weren't designed in isolation. They existed within established technical environments, operational processes, and customer requirements. That taught me an important lesson early: design rarely gets to choose the problem it wants. You inherit existing workflows, technical constraints, business requirements, and user expectations. The designer's job is to find where meaningful change is actually possible.
02 · Productizing complexity at PEER Group
At PEER Group, the challenge wasn't simply creating interfaces for existing functionality. It was thinking about how complicated functionality could become a coherent product experience. That meant deciding what belongs together, what deserves its own workflow, what users need to see first, and which complexity should be exposed versus handled by the product. This became the foundation for how I approached subsequent product work.
03 · Moving into a consumer facing financial product
At Netcoins, the environment changed again. The product operated in a financial/crypto context, but the experience needed to be far more approachable than the underlying domain. Enterprise users can sometimes tolerate complexity because they're trained to operate the system. Consumer facing products have much less room for that. The product needed to communicate complex financial actions clearly while giving users confidence that they understood what would happen next.
04 · Joining Videri at an inflection point
When I joined Videri, I encountered the transition problem at a much larger organizational level. The company was moving from its roots as a CMS + hardware business toward an enterprise SaaS platform, and eventually toward supporting MSPs and partners. The product needed to support a more sophisticated customer base without abandoning the workflows existing customers depended on. The question wasn't "how should we redesign Videri?" It was: what does Videri need to become, and how do we get there without breaking everything along the way?
05 · Portal 3
The evolution of the Videri portal became one of the clearest examples. Rather than simply modernizing the visual design, the work involved reconsidering the structure of the platform as its scope expanded: navigation, information architecture, device management, content relationships, enterprise workflows, and scalability. The visual redesign was the visible result; the more important work was deciding what the product should become underneath it.
06 · Enterprise requirements change the product
Moving toward enterprise customers introduced requirements that don't exist to the same degree in smaller products. SOC 2 and enterprise expectations aren't just compliance checkboxes. They affect how a product needs to think about users, access, permissions, administration, data, operational visibility, and reliability. Translating those business, technical, and operational requirements into experiences users could actually understand became a recurring part of my role.
07 · Designing through migration
Migrating our biggest client is another example of this type of work. The important design constraint was that the new experience couldn't simply be optimized for a hypothetical future customer. Real customers, real devices, and real workflows already existed. That meant designing for continuity and change simultaneously.
The work isn't about throwing away the past. It's about determining what should survive, what needs to change, and what needs to be built for the future.
The pattern across my career
Brock Solutions → PEER Group → Netcoins → Videri. Industrial software, enterprise software, a financial/crypto product, an enterprise SaaS platform. Each transition taught me something about designing products that are changing faster than their existing interfaces. Design is the bridge between what a product was and what it needs to become.
