Case study 01 · 2025
A licence register for a global pharma group became a platform leadership uses to make purchasing decisions.
Across sites and functions, licences were tracked wherever the buyer happened to track things: a spreadsheet, an inbox, or a colleague's head. Nobody could reliably answer what the group owned, who used it, or what renewed next quarter.
Renewals were approved defensively, duplicates were bought in parallel, and unused seats quietly rolled over. I used stakeholder discovery to shape the schema, workflow, and technical boundaries before implementing the platform.
An internal tool nobody trusts is worse than the spreadsheet it replaced. Trust is a design requirement.
I mapped how licences are actually requested, approved, and renewed across functions, including the informal steps nobody documents. The data model came out of those conversations, so the tool already spoke the users' language.
The register itself saves nothing. Scheduled jobs escalate to the owner, then approver, then leadership, so a renewal becomes a decision made with time instead of an invoice discovered too late.
I aligned with each business-side owner, migrated existing sheets, and stayed on the hook after launch. A platform handed over at deploy is a platform quietly abandoned by quarter's end.