Platform users were raising support requests but losing trust in the outcome. After an initial response, communication went silent — no status, no owner, no ETA. Issues persisted and workarounds proliferated. The product and support teams had no structured evidence of where the resolution journey was breaking down or what the real cost to users was.

Understand where users get stuck, redirected, or delayed across the full post-submission support journey. Quantify how long issues persist and the tangible impact on delivery. Identify what users need in terms of communication, speed, and ownership — and translate that into prioritised product and operational recommendations.

I designed a branching discussion guide with three distinct paths — problem resolution, quick fix, and feedback/inquiry — to capture divergent experiences without forcing participants into a single narrative. 60-minute remote sessions, sole researcher end-to-end. Quantitative signals layered from the customer service platform (3 and 6 month windows) and ~80 screener responses. Analysis conducted using HeyMarvin, cross-validated manually.

• Fast initial response raises expectations — then communication disappears entirely
• 10 of 11 users described support as a “black box” after the first reply
• Tickets auto-closed as “resolved” while the problem persisted
• 11 of 11 users built manual workarounds due to unpredictable timelines
• One user worked a 17-hour day compensating for platform issues on a live client project
• Feature requests acknowledged politely, then vanished without trace
• Poor urgency triage: critical issues treated identically to low-priority queries

The platform was scaling across global agency markets, but the access management system was fundamentally broken. Admins could not govern who had access to what. Platform environments drifted instance to instance. Ex-employees retained active access. Workarounds proliferated — including one admin who built a custom script just to audit permissions. No structured research existed to make the case for prioritisation to product leadership.

Diagnose where the access management model breaks down across the full project lifecycle, and at what cost. Understand how admins are currently governing access, where architecture fragments, and what the operational and compliance impact of current failures is. Provide product leadership with a causal account of why the system fails at scale — not just a list of bugs.

I led the evaluative interview track alongside a parallel heuristic evaluation (Nielsen-Molich framework, full platform). All findings were mapped to a 7-phase project lifecycle — Lead/Pitch through to Scale — with severity rated per phase. Three independent evidence streams (interviews, heuristic evaluation, and a ~1,500-person proficiency survey) gave the findings a robustness difficult for stakeholders to dismiss. Analysis conducted using HeyMarvin, cross-validated manually.

• 10/10 admins reported broken or unpredictable permission behaviour
• No audit trail — impossible to see who had access to what, or when it changed
• Ex-employees retaining active access; regions granting Owner to entire teams as a workaround
• 3–6 versions of the same folder structure across one client’s markets
• A global FMCG client required ~200 clicks/hour to update 8 of 150 workspaces = 20+ hours admin
• One admin built a custom Puppeteer script to audit permissions — the tooling didn’t exist
• Governance failures directly blocked commercialisation with enterprise clients