Docplanner marketplace: cutting design debt by 83%
Doctor and clinic profiles are key pages of Docplanner's marketplace. After years of fast growth they had drifted into about ten divergent versions, each with its own components and behavior. I initiated and led the work to unify them: a shared modular foundation, a long-term layout vision and a rollout plan. Measured design debt fell by 83%, from 2,534 to 438 points.
Type
Marketplace
, Design System
Role: Product Design Manager, working as lead designer and initiative owner
Team: 1 product designer · 2 developers at 50% · 3 product teams and 1 business team as stakeholders
Timeline: 6 months, 2023-2024
Company: Docplanner
The Problem
As Austin Knight defines it, design debt is the buildup of design inconsistencies that hurt the user experience. At Docplanner, rapid growth led to fragmented designs on our most important pages: doctor and clinic profiles.
Years of experiments and market-specific needs turned a unified layout into nearly ten different versions. The result was a "Frankenstein" product with:
Incoherent UX across different pages
Inconsistent UI behavior
Poor mobile support
A setup that was hard to scale for different subscription plans
Goals
I led an initiative to clean up this design and code fragmentation. The goal was to build a scalable, consistent experience across all markets, plans, and user flows, while speeding up future work.
To measure success, I set a target to reduce design debt by 80%. Using David Politi's method, our starting debt was 2,534 points.
Process
A product designer on my team mapped the existing profiles; I defined the content structure and the layout direction myself. I led the project in five stages, in close collaboration with cross-functional teams:
Alignment: Ran workshops to unify team goals.
Research: Mapped user needs and analyzed similarities and differences between profiles.
Foundations: Defined the structural and modular design direction.
Vision: Created a long-term layout and component strategy.
Execution: Secured two developers part-time, prioritized quick wins, and rolled out changes.
Getting teams on board
Three product teams worked on profiles when I started. Getting them on board was easy: their own developers had raised the problem, saying it was getting harder to stay lean and experiment quickly on these pages. That worried the product managers, so all three saw the initiative as a must-have. A fourth team joined from outside my product stream: a business team that wanted a tool for managing which sections appear on which type of profile, so they could test different subscription offers. They were glad to bring their needs in.
The hard part was capacity. I had no development team of my own, so I could not plan sprints or commit to dates. In the end I negotiated two developers from one of the product teams, each at 50% of their time.
Outcome
In six months, from the kick-off workshops with all stakeholders to rolling out changes with two part-time developers, we shipped almost all Quick Wins. We cut design debt by 83% (from 2,534 down to 438 points), making the product more consistent and scalable. The new layout now serves as an official guideline book, speeding up future experiments and keeping teams aligned. It also cut development time on profile changes and set the team up for a new design system.
