Bid Management Portal

For a business unit where bid turnaround time is directly tied to revenue, the absence of shared visibility wasn't a workflow inconvenience, it was a competitive risk.

• No single source of truth for bid status across 13+ teams
• SLA breaches only surfaced after a deadline had already passed
• Reporting was manual, built by chasing data across departments
• Onboarding a new stakeholder into an in-flight bid had no structured path

Thirteen-plus teams, five different tracking methods, converging on nothing.

Thirteen-plus teams tracked status independently via email threads, spreadsheets, verbal updates, and memory, converging on nothing.

Discovery sessions across all thirteen departments surfaced a consistent pattern: everyone needed visibility, but no two teams needed the same slice of it. The real design problem wasn't "build a dashboard", it was: build one system that shows thirteen different teams thirteen different truths from the same dataset.

The artifact that ruled out a single universal dashboard.

I ran structured discovery sessions with representatives from each of the thirteen stakeholder departments to understand what they currently used to track bid status (spreadsheets, email, memory), what information they needed to act versus what was just "nice to know", and where in the bid lifecycle they typically got blindsided by a missed handoff or deadline.

That input, thirteen sessions' worth of interview notes and workflow walkthroughs, synthesized into three findings that shaped everything downstream:

From raw, messy stakeholder input to three clear themes, and the design direction they produced.

Before any screen, I built a permissions matrix: every stakeholder role mapped against what they could see, edit, and access. That matrix became the spine of the IA. Navigation stayed identical for everyone, what rendered inside each section changed by role. One shell, role-aware content, rather than thirteen bespoke experiences to maintain.

Only the Bid Analyst role sees the "New bid request" button. All other roles see the same nav shell without that action.

Four sections, one shell. Role-conditional rendering keeps the nav identical while personalising every surface beneath it.

Every section of the portal was designed for every applicable role: starting from a low-fidelity wireframe, then built to pixel-precise hi-fi using MTN's Raanaa design system tokens. The same navigation shell delivers a different experience depending on who is signed in, and exactly one role can initiate a new bid request.

Before launch, I ran moderated usability sessions with five bid analysts and three department stakeholders, walking through the bid creation flow and the dashboard.

Two genuine usability issues surfaced and fixed before launch. One decision validated rather than assumed.

If I ran this again, I'd get all thirteen departments in one room before locking the permissions model. A few role-scoping decisions had to be revisited once specific teams, Risk & Compliance especially, surfaced needs that hadn't come up in individual discovery sessions. One alignment workshop early on would likely have saved a full redesign cycle on the permissions architecture.

I'd also pull SLA configuration into scope from day one. It became one of the most valuable parts of the system, but because it was added after the dashboard and creation flow were already largely locked, retrofitting the "at risk" logic was more constrained than it needed to be.