Design-led investment at Podium

At Podium, our product design team is constantly striving to enhance the customer experience. Over the past four years, we’ve made significant strides in this effort, resulting in software that is smoother, more accessible, and more reliable. While individual improvements may seem small, they add up over time to create a remarkable transformation. Here’s a look at how our product has evolved from 2021 to 2025.

How we got there

The short answer: sweating the details, patience, and grit.
What did we do? Well, we did lots of things. We built, implemented and maintained a design system, completed two navigation redesigns, updated global settings, added a first-time ux, added page templates with responsive layouts, and overhauled our typography and icon system.

With design, the proof is in the pudding. You can talk about the work, but ultimately the results, good or bad, are in plain sight.

Maintenance matters

Another initiative design organized was #ux-paper-cuts. To instill a culture of ownership and continuous improvement, the design team managed a slack channel called ux-paper-cuts. The page encouraged any employee at the company to post ux issues they find in the product. If a team was tagged, they’d pick up the issue within a few weeks. Absent of this process, software inevitably regresses over time.

Higher standards

As the product improved at Podium, so did our standards. Now, product teams expect to use the design system with every project. Text and color systems live in shared design tokens. Icons exist in a single library. We've put care into the product and I'm proud of that.