Isendu

From business idea to prototyping to market launch to the first round of investment. Holding the role of Product Manager and UX/UI Designer, I contributed to the startup phase of Isendu, which later became the most innovative shipping management platform in Italy.

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Customer

Isendu is the leading API and dashboard for shipping that provides the necessary tools for marketplaces, warehouses and eCommerce stores to succeed.

isendu.com

My role

I designed and led product development with the role of Head of Product from day zero to the first round of investment.

Transform the order fulfillment process from a boring and repetitive task to a competitive asset.

From a product perspective, the biggest challenge of the Isendu project was to design a shipping dashboard while simplifying the waybill generation experience as much as possible.

If the market offered only "management software," Isendu's goal was instead to innovate the user experience in managing the entire order fulfillment process.

On one side I focused on design for simplicity but robust, reliable design. On the other, the interface was to become the starting point of an e-commerce growth path in which I would gradually understand that long, repetitive tasks could be automated through a few clicks and thatautomation would lead to savings in labor hours without causing errors in shipping.

From strategy to design

The first thing I did was to study and define a clear strategic product goal aligned with the company vision and make it visually clear, dropping it down to the User Interface level.

An interface is not beautiful or ugly but functional or nonfunctional.

If Isendu's vision was to enter the market as quickly as possible as the next-generation shipping management software, then it was clear that we needed to focus on simplicity and speed.

The challenge of designing to change a (bad) habit

The dashboard was then defined as a table where to show incoming, shipped, and delivered orders from multiple sources (Amazon, Shopify, eBay). Let the users change their habits is one of the most complex design challenges ever, and in our case, it would not have been correct to focus on a disruptive UX. Instead, we had to focus on ease of use and solidity to help users understand the innovation and trust it.

Before

After

From design to development

Design assists development, it doesn't have to slows it down.

As a product strategy, I established the two essential goals:

Being thesimplest app in the industry
Speed up code writing as much as possible

I, therefore, defined a basic design system starting from an enterprise-level UI library: Ant.Design.

The design system's first goal was to limit the number of components used by the app because it was to be expected many changes after the MVP launch.
The second goal was to let the technical team be familiar with the visual language used so that they could did not always have to be redesigned from scratch by the design team.

The Figma project

- Can you give me the mockup?
- No.

The organization of the Figma project is the basis of the design culture within the team.

In the Isendu project, each file was dedicated to an area of the product, and all files were following the same structure to ensure the best design-development hand-off and the async comprehension of design choices.

Results

Isendu became the most promising SaaS industry player in Italy, with a pool of European investors behind it who chose it because of its market positioning and high product scalability.

I guided the product from release to its first year of life achieving important goals:
- 250 active e-commerce per day
- churn rate at 2% for customers with at least 4 months of use
- 100,000 shipments handled per month

The product team grew from 3 to 12 people and the basic design principles allowed rapid scalability of the team and the product without having to redefine or restructure the architecture of the entire system.

They say about me

"Vincenzo is methodical, analytical, and creative. The perfect partner to design with in full lean startup approach. He has the unique ability to be able to pull out amazing results with limited resources. Curious and inspiring, that's what working with Vincenzo is like."

Marco Pericci

Head of Growth @ Isendu