Ben Simmons — B2B SaaS & Dashboard Product Design

Ask a team where their product diverged from the design, and nobody can point to a decision. That's the problem.Design finished, files went over the wall, and somewhere in week four a developer hit a case the Figma didn't cover — an empty table with a failed fetch behind it, a permission that should hide a column — made a reasonable call under deadline, and moved on. Nothing was wrong. Two hundred of those and the product works but isn't the one you approved.In data-heavy software the gap is widest, because most of the product is the cases a handoff never specifies.Two vendors make it worse: now there's a seam, and each side can point at the other.We don't hand off. Design and engineering are the same team in the same weekly cycle, so those cases get decided once, by two people who both carry the result.Eight weeks to a working product.Weeks 1-2 — discovery, core flows and technical architecture agreed together, so nothing is specified that can't ship in the time available.Weeks 3-5 — design and build in parallel. You get a working build every week, not a screenshot.Weeks 6-8 — edge states, QA, performance, security, deployment, handover.You end with:— Full UX and UI in Figma, with a component library— Production frontend built against that library— Backend and API work, or integration with your existing stack— Third-party integrations and data pipelines— Admin and support tooling— Responsive web, plus native mobile where it's needed— Testing, deployment, documentation— Your code, your repos, your design filesTypical engagements: MVP design and development, B2B SaaS platform build, dashboard and analytics products, fintech and web3 platforms, internal tools and admin systems, product rebuild and re-platforming, design-to-code delivery, technical co-founder support.One team at U1CORE — design and engineering together. Platforms in this portfolio have processed $720M+ in production payments.

Nobody chooses to open an ERP. They open it because a customer is waiting.That single fact should shape every screen, and almost never does. ERP and CRM interfaces are built around the data model — modules mirroring database tables, navigation mirroring the org chart — and the person in the middle has to translate between the two. Finding one customer's open orders means knowing which module owns that relationship, which is institutional knowledge, not design.So the system gets a reputation: powerful, unusable. Teams train around it for weeks. Adoption stalls. Somebody builds a shadow spreadsheet, and now your single source of truth has a second source.The fix isn't simplification — these systems are complex because the business is. It's designing around the task instead of the schema.Four weeks.Week 1 — we map the real tasks: what people are asked to do, how often, and how many screens each takes today.Weeks 2–3 — the record and workflow layer, where most of the time goes.Week 4 — permissions, edge cases, system, handoff.What we design:— Task-first navigation and global search across entities— The record: customer, order, product, contract — one view that answers without module hopping— Pipeline and stage management, with movement and forecasting— Quote, order and invoice flows end to end— Inventory, procurement and fulfilment screens— Approval chains with delegation, escalation and audit trail— Bulk operations, imports and reconciliation— Roles, permissions and field-level access, including conflict warnings— Reporting and export, plus the saved views people live in— Migration paths from the legacy screens people know— Design system and developer-ready Figma handoffTypical engagements: ERP interface design, CRM product design, sales and pipeline tools, order and inventory management, procurement systems, approval and workflow software, field-level permission design, legacy enterprise redesign, SAP/NetSuite/Dynamics front-end replacement.Design and engineering sit in one team at U1CORE, so permission and data constraints are designed with the people who have to build them.

A dashboard is not a page. It's an answer to a question somebody is asked every morning.Most get built the other way round — start from the data that happens to exist, arrange it into tiles, add a chart because the space looked empty. The result is a screen everyone opens, nobody reads, and a team that keeps a spreadsheet beside it.The admin panel gets the opposite neglect: designed last, fastest, by whoever had capacity, because it's "internal". Then support lives in it three hours a day, every permission mistake becomes a security incident, and provisioning a new customer takes a week.These two surfaces decide whether your software gets used. Neither is a styling problem.Three weeks, both designed as one product.The dashboard side:— Hierarchy built around the question, not the data— KPI and metric patterns with comparison, trend and threshold states— Charts that answer rather than decorate, with drill-down paths— Tables: sorting, filtering, column config, saved views, density— Bulk actions with confirmation and undo— Exports, scheduled reports, integrationsThe admin side:— User, team and account management— Roles and permissions, including inheritance and conflict warnings— Settings architecture that doesn't become a dumping ground— Audit logs and activity timelines— Cross-entity search, and what happens when nothing matches— Alert hierarchy tuned so people stop ignoring itPlus every state nobody designs — empty, loading, partial data, stale data, failed sync, permission denied — light and dark themes, responsive layouts, a component library and a developer-ready Figma handoff.Typical engagements: B2B SaaS dashboard design, admin and back-office systems, analytics and reporting products, enterprise software UI, multi-tenant platform admin, data-heavy product design, internal tools.Design and engineering sit in one team at U1CORE, so what gets approved is what gets shipped.

Count the tables in your product. Now count how many behave the same way.That number is your design system's real score, and in most B2B software it's low. Four teams needed a table, four teams built one. Sorting works differently in Billing than in Reports. Multi-select exists here and not there. "Archived" is greyed out on one screen and a badge on the next.Each decision was reasonable. Together they mean every new screen starts with someone opening three files to check what the last person did — which is why velocity drops with every module you add.Most design systems don't help, because they were built for marketing sites. A button, a card, a modal, and nothing for what B2B software is actually made of.Three weeks. One system for all of it.Week 1 — audit of what exists, duplications and conflicts listed, token architecture agreed.Week 2 — core and SaaS-specific components, all states.Week 3 — themes, density tiers, documentation, handoff.What's in the library:— Tokens: colour, type, spacing, elevation, radius, light and dark— Core: buttons, forms, inputs, selects, nav, tabs, modals, toasts, empty and error states— SaaS-specific: data tables with sorting, filtering, column config, pagination and bulk actions; filter and segment panels; status, role and severity badges; permission-aware layouts; KPI tiles and chart patterns; audit log and activity timeline; notification hierarchy— Density: comfortable, compact, condensed — and when each applies— A shared status vocabulary so every module names things the same— Figma library with variants, auto-layout and variables— Usage docs, naming conventions, contribution rules— Developer handoff specTypical engagements: B2B SaaS design system, admin panel component library, enterprise UI kit, data table and reporting patterns, multi-module consistency, Figma library rebuild, design token migration, design-to-code handoff.Design and engineering sit in one team at U1CORE, so the system is specified against what gets built, not against an ideal.

Three questions decide a B2B roadmap, and most teams can't answer any of them with evidence.Which role actually keeps you in the account? Where do new accounts stall in week one? What do your users do outside the product that they should be doing inside it?Without answers, prioritisation defaults to whoever asks loudest — usually the buyer in a demo, who wants another integration logo, not the operator who quietly works around your table component every day. Then renewal arrives, the buyer asks the team whether they use it, and the answer is "sort of".The order in B2B is fixed: adoption, then expansion, then upsell. Building a billing tier for a product people work around is an expensive way to learn this.Two weeks, two phases.Phase one is evidence. I use the product as each role does, read your activation, usage and churn data, tear down three to five competitors flow by flow, and interview your team plus four daily users across different roles.Phase two is decisions. Two working sessions with you, then the written strategy.Deliverables:— Sequenced quarter-by-quarter roadmap, not a wishlist— The constraint named, with the evidence behind the call— Competitor teardown of 3–5 products in your category— Core flows and IA per role— Personas from observation, not assumption— A "not now" list, with reasons— Two 90-minute sessions plus a follow-up threadTypical engagements: B2B SaaS strategy, enterprise software discovery, vertical SaaS definition, AI product positioning, marketing and analytics platforms, CRM and ERP roadmaps, MVP scoping, pricing and packaging, legacy modernisation.Design and engineering sit in one team at U1CORE, so the roadmap reflects what can actually be built in the time you have.

The clearest sign your software is failing isn't a complaint. It's a spreadsheet open next to it.Somebody keeps one because the dashboard can't answer the question they're asked every morning. Somebody else exports to CSV, sorts it in Excel, pastes the result back. A third person rebuilds the same filter by hand every Monday because the tool forgets it.None of them will raise a ticket. They adapted. The workaround became the process, the process became training, and new hires now learn the workaround as if it were the product.That's where your real requirements live.In one week you get them found, named and costed.I don't run interviews about what people would like. I sit beside the people who use the tool daily and watch what they actually do — a full shift, not a demo. Then I audit the interface against that record: navigation and IA, dashboard hierarchy, tables, filters and saved views, bulk actions, permissions, search, exports, alert noise, and the module handoffs where work falls out of the system.Deliverables:— Every workaround documented, with the reason behind it— Time cost per workaround, per person, per week— Ranked fix list, ordered by hours recovered— A removal list: screens, metrics and alerts nobody uses— Written audit plus a 60-minute walkthroughTypical engagements: B2B SaaS dashboard audit, admin and back-office UX, operations tooling, CRM usability review, internal tools, data table and reporting UX, workflow and approval systems, legacy enterprise modernisation.Design and engineering sit in one team at U1CORE, so every fix is specified in a form developers can build from.

About this ServiceMost products fail before a single screen is designed. Not because the idea is wrong — but because nobody took the time to answer the right questions first. Who exactly is the user? What's the core flow that creates value? Where does the market leave a gap you can own?Skipping discovery means building on assumptions. And assumptions are expensive to fix after development starts.U1CORE's Product Discovery & Strategy gives you a research-backed foundation before design begins — so every decision that follows is grounded in real user needs, market reality, and a clear product direction.What You GetStakeholder alignment session — goals, constraints, success metricsMarket & competitor research (3–5 players analyzed)User personas based on research and interviewsCore user flows & information architectureUX audit of existing product or competitor referencesProduct roadmap with prioritized feature listFinal strategy deck delivered in Figma + PDFProcessKickoff & stakeholder interviews (60 min) — we map your business goals, assumptions, and what success looks likeMarket & competitor research — we analyze your space, identify patterns, gaps, and benchmarks worth beatingUser research & personas — we define who your real users are, what they need, and where current solutions fail themInformation architecture & flows — we map how your product should be structured and how users move through itProduct roadmap — you get a prioritized plan: what to build first, what to validate, what to deferStrategy presentation — we walk you through everything live and align on direction before design beginsBest forStartups and product teams building a marketplace, SaaS, or fintech platform from scratch — or those who have an idea but need clarity on what exactly to build, for whom, and in what order.