Overview
InfoPrice is a Brazilian SaaS company in pricing intelligence: it collects, structures, and sells market price data to retailers and manufacturers who use it to set competitive prices. Its customers are pricing analysts, category managers, and commercial directors — people who make high-consequence revenue decisions from dense, fast-changing data.
I joined as UX Lead and became responsible for design across the full product portfolio. The role had two simultaneous mandates: improve the products users were already struggling with, and build the design function that could keep improving them after I stopped being the bottleneck.
Over roughly ten months I worked across three fronts at once — product (research, journey mapping, interface redesign, freemium product definition), system (a design system adopted by every product in the portfolio), and organization (hiring, onboarding, mentoring, and defining how design operated alongside product management). The headline outcome — NPS from −23 to +72 — was the visible result of a less visible change: design stopped reacting to product management's requests and started shaping what got built.
Business Context
InfoPrice sells decision confidence. Customers pay for pricing data they will act on — and if the interface makes that data hard to trust, hard to find, or hard to defend internally, the product's core value proposition breaks regardless of how good the underlying data is.
Three business realities shaped the design work:
A negative NPS is a retention problem, not a satisfaction problem. At −23, detractors substantially outnumbered promoters. In B2B SaaS with annual contracts, that number doesn't stay a survey result — it becomes churn, discounting pressure, and stalled expansion revenue. Fixing it was a commercial priority with a design cause.
Growth required a lower barrier to entry. The company needed a way for prospects to experience value before a full commercial commitment. That meant defining freemium product versions on product-led growth principles — a packaging and experience question as much as a pricing one, and one that forced hard decisions about which capability demonstrates value fastest.
Design was a capacity constraint on the roadmap. With multiple products and a small design function, every new initiative competed for the same limited attention. Scaling the team was necessary — but scaling headcount without shared standards would have multiplied inconsistency rather than output.
Why This Was Hard
The department existed, but operated downstream of product management — receiving specifications and producing screens. There was no mechanism for design to influence what was worth building, and no artifact base (system, research, patterns) that would let it argue from evidence rather than opinion.
Each product in the portfolio had drifted into its own patterns, components, and interaction conventions. Users moving between products paid a re-learning cost; designers and engineers paid a rebuild cost on every feature.
Pricing intelligence surfaces are tables, comparisons, filters, and time series — screens where information density is the product, not a problem to eliminate. The design challenge wasn't simplification; it was making density navigable and trustworthy for users who need to defend their conclusions to a commercial director.
A −23 NPS tells you something is wrong but nothing about what. I had to build the evidence base — surveys, heuristic analyses, buyer journey studies — while simultaneously delivering against an active roadmap, and use that evidence to earn the standing to change how the department worked.
Hiring, onboarding, and mentoring designers ran in parallel with delivery. Every hour spent defining people-management and process guidelines was an hour not spent designing — and the payoff was deferred by months.
My Role and Ownership
I owned design across the InfoPrice product portfolio, spanning execution, systems, and function-building:
Supervised UX designers across the portfolio, setting direction and reviewing work across multiple concurrent products rather than owning a single surface.
Built the research foundation — surveys, heuristic analyses, and buyer journey studies — establishing what was actually broken and giving the department a shared, evidence-based prioritization language with product management.
Created and drove adoption of the design system, taking it from a proposal to a standard adopted across every product in the portfolio.
Led the freemium product definition using product-led growth principles, working on which capabilities to expose, how value is demonstrated before purchase, and how the upgrade path is designed rather than merely advertised.
Recruited and grew the team from 4 to 10 designers, and authored the department's people-management and process-management guidelines — the operating model that let the function work consistently without me reviewing every decision.
Repositioned the department strategically, moving design from a reactive service to product management into a function that participated in defining what got built.
Approach and Key Decisions
Diagnose with instruments, not intuition.
Rather than proposing a redesign from first impressions, I ran surveys, heuristic analyses, and buyer journey studies to locate where value was actually leaking. This did two things: it produced a defensible prioritized backlog, and it demonstrated to stakeholders that design arguments could be evidenced — which was the precondition for every structural change that followed.
Treat the design system as an operating model, not a component library.
The system's purpose was not visual consistency; it was reducing the marginal cost of every future decision. Shared patterns meant designers stopped re-litigating solved problems, engineers stopped rebuilding equivalents, and new hires could contribute before they had absorbed the full portfolio's history. Adoption across all products was the goal from the start — a system used by one product is a style guide.
Fix the journey, not the screens.
Buyer journey mapping shifted the conversation from "this page is confusing" to "the user loses confidence at this specific moment, and here's what it costs." Framing problems as journey breakdowns made them legible to commercial and product stakeholders in their own terms, which is what moved design work onto the roadmap ahead of feature requests.
Design the freemium tier around proof, not restriction.
The product-led growth work turned on a single question: what is the smallest experience that makes a pricing analyst believe the data is worth paying for? Designing the free tier as a demonstration of value — rather than a deliberately crippled version of the paid product — determined both what to include and how the upgrade moment should feel.
Write the process down.
Defining people-management and process-management guidelines converted the department's practices from tacit knowledge into a documented operating model. This was what made growing from 4 to 10 designers a scaling event rather than a dilution event.
Move from reactive to strategic deliberately, not by request.
The department's repositioning was executed as a plan: build evidence, build artifacts, deliver visible wins, then use that credibility to enter roadmap conversations earlier. Each step earned the standing required for the next.
Design System Impact
The system became the mechanism through which every other improvement scaled:
Portfolio-wide adoption. Components and patterns were standardized across all products, eliminating the re-learning cost for users moving between them and the rebuild cost for teams shipping in them.
Patterns for data density. Table, filter, comparison, and state conventions were defined once for the interface types that constitute the product — the highest-leverage possible standardization in a data product.
Onboarding infrastructure. As the team grew from 4 to 10, the system functioned as documentation of how design decisions get made here, compressing the time between a designer's start date and their first useful contribution.
Reduced design–engineering rework. Shared, agreed components meant fewer specification round-trips and fewer implementation divergences discovered late.
A foundation for the freemium work. Product-led growth surfaces shipped on existing tokens and patterns rather than requiring a parallel visual language for a new commercial tier.
Outcomes
NPS moved from −23 to +72 — a 95-point swing, from a detractor-dominated base to a promoter-dominated one, driven by research-led product improvements and journey-level fixes rather than isolated interface polish.
Design system adopted across every product in the portfolio, establishing shared standards where each product had previously drifted independently.
Design team scaled from 4 to 10 designers with documented people- and process-management guidelines, growing capacity without fragmenting quality.
Freemium product versions defined on product-led growth principles, creating a route for prospects to experience value ahead of a commercial commitment.
Department repositioned from reactive to strategic, participating in defining what gets built rather than executing specifications after the fact.
Reduced rework between design and engineering through shared components and clearer handoff conventions.
Key Learnings
A negative NPS is a diagnosis request, not a verdict. The number told me the product was failing; only research told me where. The temptation is to start redesigning immediately — the higher-leverage move was to spend early weeks building instruments that made every subsequent decision defensible.
Systems scale judgment, not just pixels. The design system's real return wasn't consistency. It was that ten designers could make aligned decisions without ten conversations, which is the only way a function grows without diluting.
Design earns strategic standing; it isn't granted. Moving from reactive to strategic didn't happen because I argued for it. It happened because research artifacts, journey maps, and a visible NPS trajectory made design's contribution measurable in terms product and commercial stakeholders already cared about.
Write down how the team works, or you become the process. The guidelines were the difference between a team that scaled and a team that queued for my attention.
In data products, density is the value. The instinct to simplify is often wrong. The work is making complexity navigable and defensible — because the user's job is to justify a pricing decision to someone else.
Closing Statement
InfoPrice taught me that the most durable design outcomes are structural. The 95-point NPS swing is the headline, but the thing that outlasted my tenure is the system, the team, and the operating model that produced it — a design function that could keep finding and fixing problems after I left. That is the version of UX leadership I've pursued since: not only delivering good product work, but building the conditions that make good work repeatable.