Led the end-to-end rebuild of Sesimi’s core SaaS platform, enhancing UX, onboarding and scalability for enterprise clients such as Toyota, Volkswagen and Audi. Delivered a 34% uplift in engagement and zero client churn during migration.
As Senior Product Manager, I spearheaded the transformation of Sesimi’s legacy platform into a modern, scalable solution tailored for global enterprise use. The existing platform had become fragile and cluttered, leading to friction in the user journey, onboarding bottlenecks and rising support costs. The rebuild marked a defining shift for the business, both in product experience and strategic direction.
This project spanned UX research, product strategy, technical delivery and global client migration and was a defining moment for the business.
By early 2020, the technical and user experience debt in the original Sesimi platform had become impossible to ignore.
Built over years in a monolithic codebase, Sesimi’s frontend was a tangle of React and Angular 1 components, resulting in slow page loads, fragile functionality, and an increasingly painful development environment for engineers.
The templating engine, tied tightly to Adobe Creative Suite, compounded the problem: every Adobe update broke our model, outputs were slow, and failures were frequent. The impact was clear: support tickets piled up, customer frustration grew, and the platform struggled to meet the growing complexity of whitelabelled accounts and nuanced client requirements.
When COVID-19 slowed down many of our clients' marketing activities, we saw a rare opportunity: rebuild the platform behind the scenes while continuing to service live accounts. It wasn’t a matter of if we would rebuild Sesimi — it was a matter of how fast and how smartly we could do it.
We began by forming dedicated cross-functional teams and conducting a full audit of the existing platform. Every feature and function was categorised:
I mapped user needs across different client types to prioritise migrations:
We adopted the Shape Up methodology from Basecamp, focusing on six-week build cycles ("bets") to ship high-priority functionality first.
Throughout the rebuild, I ran weekly executive presentations to the CEO and CTO, keeping leadership aligned and making trade-offs visible.
Certain features, like posting directly to social media or in-platform notifications, were consciously deferred, prioritising stability, performance and core functionality over "nice-to-haves" that showed little real user value.
We also ran internal workshops, client interviews and UX design iterations, balancing engineering feasibility with user experience improvements.
Importantly, we planned the migration roadmap carefully: grouping accounts based on complexity (language needs, compliance tools, content volume) to manage risk intelligently.
Leading the Sesimi platform rebuild taught me that successful large-scale product migrations aren’t just about technical architecture, they’re about user journeys, stakeholder management and conscious trade-offs.
It also reinforced the need for product leaders to act as translators: balancing business urgency, user needs and engineering realities without losing sight of the long-term vision.
Sometimes, the hardest decisions are about what not to build and why building trust internally is just as critical as building new features.
