Showpad

At Showpad, I am the Design Lead of the Sales Content Management space, focused on product & strategy - leading initiatives for consolidating the strength & presence of the design team through workshop alignment & adequate documentation. The role is strongly AI-driven in a high UX-maturity organisation. Given that my skills are strongly tied to inter-departmental negotiation, I strive to adequately shape the product requirements from the very inception of any feature, thus ensuring a collaborative environment where are actors gain upfront value from our interactions.

01. Workshops & Stakeholder Alignment

A large part of my activities is dependent on reducing cross-departmental friction. This means that adequate stakeholder alignment is a vital part of any department lead's activities (whether it's product managers, engineering managers, or Design Leads).

Shaping business and product requirements involves ensuring a seat at the table. For this reason, I continuously attain that seat through organizing alignment workshops - meetings where I facilitate the necessary space for stakeholders to align on the realities of any product endeavour.

A vital part of this process entails relying on information visualisation (schemas, 2-minute Figjams, quick AI sessions, etc.) and on creating & maintaining open channels of communication with all parties involved. This open channel relies on a transparent "open door" policy.

Continious Negotiation

a stylised example of the appropriate communication channels, illustrating the required negotiation of every single product decision;

Inclusive Workshops

a symbolic representation depicting several typologies of workshops which I faciliated (held with: analytics, design, engineering, product, or all stakeholders)

Guiding Stakeholder Alignment

a representation of open-communication segments ranging from Jira tickets, Figma comments, Figjams, slack channels, ad-hoc 3 amigo meetings, etc.

02. Documentation & Procedural Efficiency

My role focused heavily on driving the UX-maturity both from within the design team and from the organisation itself.

While procedural improvements of internal procedures entail a continuous effort and level of flexibility from all stakeholders, my task was to ensure that every actor involved gained value from our interactions.

This means creating clear workflows that scale well, standardising cross-team practices and ensuring knowledge is captured, accessible and consistently applied.

03. Guiding the Redesign

A key part of my mission with Showpad is to guide the core redesign of the Sales Content Management application (and subsequent "control panel" for the entire product).

Subsequently, the main objective is to adjust core workflows to make administrative tasks faster and more intuitive, without completely rewriting the process of the original.

While the scalability of the UI patterns that support adoption of future features was a key objective, clarity & consistency of all UX patterns is paramount to this mission. Every UX decision required adequate documentation and consistent cross-platform adoption.

Thus, this mission goes beyond changing the wrapper of an outdated UI & integrating a new design system. The redesign entails making informed, data-driven decisions that: change as little as possible, take into account industry standards, are feasible, ensure a smooth transition even for change-adverse loyalists, and add tangible value to the business objectives (to both Showpad and the ICP).

The Outdated Original

The Transitional Intermediary

The New Normal

04. Product Interventions

A large part of my activities is based on defining & creating new features within the product. I have outlined 3 examples: Bulk Editing (expansion of existing feature), User Management (redesign of existing feature), and Library Health (completely new feature).

The objective was that of improving core-wrokflows for our users with: direct, tangible & immediate results that were clearly visible.

Empowering users using AI and improving the end-client's organisational health by relying on industry-standard content management (based on the customer's business profile).

A vital part of this process entails relying on data-driven decision-making by transforming complicated and unconnected tasks into guided, bite-sized flows users can easily take to perform their daily work.

Bulk Editing

a feature expansion that saw tangible workflow improvement in terms of bulk content management by applying common UX principles and industry-standard information visualisation hacks;

User Management

a cohesive implementation project that entailed the redesign of the previous User Management section of the original platform, expanding its capabilities and introducing new concepts to assist admins & managers;

Library Health

a new feature that would streamline the administrative management of the content library by empowering customers with AI-driven insights into industry-standard practices for their content;

04. AI-driven UX maturity

Productivity & design AI-tools are slowly and painfully changing the game. I have examined and compared several pertinent AI-design tools* (DesignVerse, FigmaMake, loveable, Stitch, etc.), exploring their potential benefits (and inherent risks) for adoption by our design team.

Simultaneously, as product-creators (whether it's analytics, marketing, designers, engineering, or product owners) there exists a shared responsibility in cautiously adopting and integrating AI into the product, done in such a punctual way that its impact is tangible but also non-invasive. Accounting for LLM mistakes (hallucinations, misinterpretations, overgeneralizations, etc.) and ensuring that customers aren't impacted by these mistakes is a key mantra with which I am integrating AI into my products.

Correspondingly, at Showpad, AI is sprinkled into complicated workflows and is being organically adopted. The future vision is to expand the current LLM that will further drive the customer business objectives and land tangible results. This integration is done cautiously and with optimism.

The aforementioned analysis of AI-design tools* focused heavily on scoping out DesignVerse for internal workflow improvements, with the secondary objective of evaluating it for its potential integration into our platform builders, thus empowering our ICPs through out-of-the-box AI tools.

**This executive summary has been redacted to only illustrate the informative aspects of my capabilities in the mission of exploring the potential of DesignVerse when compared to other AI design tools.

Executive Summary ↗

Nela Matijevic

Product Design Manager • Showpad

“Flaviu is one of those designers you can trust instantly. He handles complexity with ease, communicates clearly, and consistently produces high-quality work with very little direction. He elevates collaboration across teams and brings a calm, grounded presence to challenging situations. He is an asset to any team he joins."

Linkedin Profile

*a walkthrough

The primary driver of my role involves knowing the product inside out. As the Lead Designer of SCM, attaining an understanding of the entire Showpad suite is a requirement. As I am Product-driven in my approach to design, shared ownership becomes a key responsibility I strive to take on.

To illustrate this, I have created a comprehensive walkthrough that showcases my punctual interventions & capabilities during my time at Showpad.

Showpad →

Showpad
**

< Previous Project