Insights

Writing on complex product design.

Articles on product design, UX architecture, design systems, and complex enterprise systems - organized by persona and topic, drawn from real projects.

23 articles

Zammit

Project ManagersUsability Testing

Testing a Spatial Configurator Without CAD

On Zammit's shelving configurator, we asked people to lay out custom shelving — dimensions, shelf count, depth, placement — with zero CAD knowledge. That is a usability risk you cannot hand-wave. So I ran testing as a recurring checkpoint tied to delivery milestones, not a one-off before launch. The payoff is for project managers as much as designers: testing turns a scary, vague risk ('can buyers do this without a salesperson?') into specific, scheduled, fixable issues. And inside an engine with real constraints, testing early tells you which problems are worth engineering time and which a better sequence solves for free. Predictability beats surprises.

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Zammit

Product ManagersMicro-interactions & Animation

Micro-interactions That Made an Engine's Rules Feel Like Feedback

Rule-heavy configurators feel like the system is fighting you — unless feedback shows why. On Zammit, micro-interactions turned the engine's logic into a conversation: a value recalculating, the summary shifting, an invalid option visibly settling out of reach instead of vanishing. PMs, the test for every animation: does it explain the system's behavior, or just decorate it? Only the former protects flow completion.

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Zammit

Project ManagersDelivery & Handoff to Development

Handing Off 40 Configurators Without Losing the Thread

Handing off ~40 configurators, 25 e-commerce flows, and 6 onepagers — solo, over ~2 years — taught me that handoff isn't an event, it's a rhythm. At that volume the real risk a project manager loses sleep over is drift: checkout behaving one way here, another way there. My defense was deliberate pattern reuse and handing off the decision logic, not just visuals — especially for configurators bound to the DriveWorks engine's rules. Shared patterns are schedule insurance: estimates hold, review cycles shrink, and developers implement without guessing. Clear intent plus clear constraints beats a backlog of clarifying questions every time.

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Zammit

Product Managers

Designing Planning Systems for the Factory Floor: How Do You Translate Industrial Logic Into an Interface Operators Actually Love?

Product managers in industrial domains, don't impose a consumer-product UX paradigm on production operators. They're professionals with years of experience who work in shifts. In the manufacturing platform project we designed a system with aggressive shortcuts and a screen flow tailored to repetitive actions. Respect for professionalism = fast adoption.

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Zammit

Product ManagersFirst-Run Onboarding

First-Run Onboarding for People Who'd Never Configured Without a Rep

Every Zammit user's first run shared one fear: they'd always bought custom products through a salesperson, now they're alone with a configurator. So onboarding wasn't a feature tour — it started them from sensible defaults on a valid product they could react to, not a blank canvas. Editing something concrete beats building from nothing. PMs: first-run success isn't 'saw the tooltips.' It's 'reached a configuration they trusted enough to request a quote.'

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Zammit

Engineering LeadersDesign Systems

One Design System Across 40 Configurators and a Rigid Engine

Solo designer, ~40 configurators, one rigid configurator engine underneath. The only thing that made that survivable was a Design System built around the engine's constraints — not against them. Standard inputs, validation, quote and checkout components meant engineering stopped re-deciding the same interaction forty times. A Design System isn't visual polish for CTOs. It's a smaller surface area to build and test.

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Zammit

Engineering LeadersR&D Collaboration

Designing Inside the DriveWorks Engine, With R&D

Every Zammit screen lived inside the DriveWorks configurator engine. That meant I could not design in a vacuum and hand it to R&D — the engine's rule model decided what was cheap, costly, or impossible. So I learned its grammar and designed in conversation with the people maintaining the configurations. A per-shelf depth control isn't a visual question; it's 'can the rule tree express this without becoming unmaintainable?' For engineering leaders, that's the collaboration that saves you: a designer fluent in the constraint stops shipping requests that quietly explode complexity. The best design inside a constrained engine makes the buildable product easy — and the unbuildable one obviously not worth chasing.

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Zammit

Founders

Industry 4.0 Startups: How Do You Crack the Reluctance of Manufacturing Plants to Adopt New Technology?

Founders in Industry 4.0, manufacturing plants are a conservative market that rejects new technologies. In the manufacturing platform project we proved that the secret is to design an experience that feels 'familiar' to the veteran operator — while being revolutionary beneath the surface. Rollout design = 50% of your startup's success.

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Zammit

Engineering LeadersProject-Specific Data Visualization

Visualizing a Shelving Configuration Without Requiring CAD

Zammit's flagship: a spatial shelving configurator for people with zero CAD knowledge. The visualization had to faithfully represent a manufacturable object while hiding everything CAD-scary. The engineering-interesting part: the picture is bound to the same constrained model the engine enforces, so what the user sees can never drift from what the factory can build. Configurator data viz isn't a chart on top — it's a real-time projection of the product model.

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Zammit

FoundersAI Strategy in the Product

The Honest AI Question for a Made-to-Order Platform

Founders always ask where AI goes in the product. The disciplined answer beats the hopeful one. Zammit ran on a configurator engine where value came from deterministic, fabricable output — a contractor sets dimensions and edge profiles, and a laser cutter has to make it, every time. So the bar for any AI is simple: does it respect the manufacturing constraints? The opening isn't replacing the configurator. It's reducing the cognitive load of letting non-experts configure complex made-to-order products without CAD and without a salesperson. Anchor AI to the human job you removed — and let the engine's hard constraints, not the hype, set the boundary.

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Zammit

Project Managers

Digitizing Production Processes: How Do You Manage a Project That Changes Decades-Old Habits?

Project managers in industrial digitization, the hard challenge isn't technical — it's cultural. In the manufacturing platform project we brought veteran operators onto the design team as true partners, and built a phased rollout with overlap. An excellent system that no one uses = total failure.

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Zammit

CEOs

Industrial Digitization as a Competitive Lever: The ROI of Modern Planning Systems in Manufacturing Plants

CEOs of industrial companies, digitization isn't an 'upgrade' — it's an existential requirement for competing with international plants. In the manufacturing platform project we proved that cutting a production order from 30 minutes to 5 minutes = hundreds of thousands of shekels a year. The difference between an investment that pays off and one that sits on the shelf = a design operators love.

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