Still polishing this one. Want to walk through it together?
Email meUnifying the digital workspace of the world’s largest brewer by turning prototypes into the spec — and a design system into the production line.
The Challenge
“Vague requests, no functional specs, no direct user access — and a deadline.”
As the world’s largest brewer, ABInBev needed to fold five fragmented internal platforms into a single ecosystem so its operators could stop tab-switching and start working. The catch: the design team had no access to those operators, and was expected to deliver full prototypes off briefs that read more like wishes than requirements.
The Solution
We made the prototype the specification. High-fidelity Figma screens became the artifact stakeholders reacted to — and the design system we built underneath let us go from a vague request to a full prototype in two days.
51
Platforms unified
2
Days to assemble a full prototype
0
Specs at start prototypes became the spec
1
Design system shipped
The Process
With no specs to follow, ambiguity was the medium we worked in. The answer was a four-beat loop: workshop, prototype, review, refine — and a design system to make every loop faster than the last.
Strategy & Ideation
When the spec is missing, ideation is the spec. I designed the workshops to be short, opinionated, and impossible to leave without a direction.
To bridge the gap between vague requests and concrete solutions, I moderated timed ideation sessions in Miro and Google Jam. Strict structure, ruthless time-boxing, maximum output:
We adopted a “just keep prototyping” philosophy: high-fidelity screens, fast. Two enablers made it possible. We moved straight from sketch to hi-fi visual to validate which features the platform actually needed — using the screen itself as the discovery tool. And we built a design system in parallel: a standardized library of components that let the team assemble a full prototype in as little as two days.
Execution & Validation
With no specification documents to start from, the prototype review was the requirements phase. We ran a continuous cycle:
Three decisions did the heavy lifting. Each one chose speed and clarity over completeness — because in an ambiguous brief, the cost of waiting always beats the cost of being wrong.
Instead of waiting for written specs, we made the screen itself the artifact stakeholders responded to. Every review surfaced constraints the brief never named — and turned vague approval into concrete commitments.
Every approved pattern fed back into a standardized component library. After a few cycles, a designer could assemble a complete prototype in as little as two days — turning iteration speed into the team’s biggest asset.
User flow diagrams turned tangled internal processes into a single visible map. They let us see exactly where small fixes were enough — and where a full redesign, like the new dashboard, was the only honest answer.
Conclusion & Takeaways
When you can’t talk to users and the brief is a paragraph, the prototype is the fastest tool you have to ask better questions. A design system isn’t a polish layer — it’s how iteration becomes affordable enough to keep doing.