Meridian

Overview

Meridian is a desktop workflow management application designed for enterprise operations teams. These teams manage processes that span multiple departments, require sequential approvals, and need clear audit trails. The existing tools they used — spreadsheets, email chains, and legacy systems — created bottlenecks and errors at every handoff.

I led the product design from research through to launch, working closely with engineering and customer success to deliver a tool that reduced process completion time by 40%.

The Problem

Enterprise operations teams were managing multi-step workflows across disconnected tools. Key pain points included:

Process owners couldn't see where workflows were stalling. Team members received unclear handoffs that led to rework. Compliance teams lacked the audit visibility they needed. New team members took weeks to learn existing processes because nothing was documented in one place.

Process

I started with two weeks of stakeholder interviews and contextual inquiry sessions, observing how operations teams actually moved work through their existing systems. This revealed that the core challenge wasn't task management — it was state visibility. People needed to know where things were, who was responsible, and what was blocking progress.

I ran a series of concept sprints, testing three different interaction models for workflow creation: a linear step builder, a node-based canvas, and a hybrid approach. User testing with 8 participants showed strong preference for the hybrid model, which combined the simplicity of linear steps with the flexibility to add parallel branches.

Interactive prototype — best viewed on desktop. Open in Figma

Solution

The final design centers on three core experiences:

Workflow Builder — A hybrid canvas that lets process owners create and modify workflows visually. Steps can be linear or branched, with conditions, assignments, and SLAs defined inline. We designed a grammar for the builder that made complex workflows read like sentences.

Operations Dashboard — A real-time view of all active workflows with clear status indicators, bottleneck alerts, and the ability to drill into any workflow instance. We used progressive disclosure to keep the dashboard scannable while giving power users deep access.

Task Inbox — A personal view that surfaces exactly what each team member needs to act on next, with all the context needed to complete their step without switching tools.

Outcome

Meridian launched to 12 enterprise pilot customers. Within the first quarter:

Average workflow completion time dropped by 40%. Handoff errors decreased by 65%. Time to onboard new team members to a process went from 2 weeks to 2 days. The design system created for Meridian was adopted across three other products in the company's suite.