A clean product win, fully owned · Neon One, 2018
Early-2010s web editors were clunky and routinely produced badly designed pages. Clients with dev resources were happy — they got free rein with HTML/CSS/JS. Everyone else either published something embarrassing or asked our engineers to build their site for them. Engineering time was quietly becoming a services function.
I designed a template-based drag-and-drop site builder — deliberately not a full Wix. A set of site designs sharing the same variable elements: fonts, colors, navigation, homepage media, buttons, widget management. The design constraint that made it work was calibrating flexibility: flexible enough that a client could legitimately match their brand, constrained enough that every fundraising widget — progress bars, leaderboards, countdown timers, featured pages — always rendered correctly against live platform data. Configurable, but always on-brand and always compliant with the data model.
Adoption hit 100% of the user base, despite requiring customers to migrate off their existing custom sites — the strongest possible signal that the tradeoff was calibrated right. Customization work moved from engineering to the clients themselves, and the dev team got a meaningful chunk of its time back.
Textbook product sense on a problem I identified myself: a real user-and-cost pain, a solution whose core design decision was what not to allow, and an outcome measured in both adoption and internal leverage. Later iterations of this surface — a Liquid templating system powering white-label sites for a top-5 reseller client, and a 2024 build-vs-buy integration with a third-party CMS — grew out of this foundation.