Don't rebuild a working product. Understand it, then improve it.

TL;DR

HP sells PCs, workstations, printers, servers, storage, and networking to businesses. Almost none of it sells off a shelf, because a partner configures each machine to a customer and sends back a quote.

I designed the interface for that process from May 2022 to September 2023. Partners were quoting real money through it every day while I worked on it.

The design files had no component library, no auto layout, and no shared patterns. I brought order to that first, then spent the rest of the time on what the order was for.

The three platforms

OneConfig. Engineers build a configuration here and define which parts can be combined. Mine, and the hard one.

CPQ. The internal platform where quotes get created and managed. It already handled laptops, monitors, and workstations, and I added the printer section.

IQ. The output of everything above. The customer picks what they need and a quote comes back, built on rules set upstream.

Why OneConfig is the hard one

Everything downstream inherits the rules defined there. A wrong combination in OneConfig stays wrong in every quote after it, all the way to the customer.

Parts rule out other parts, because components have to physically fit and work together. The catalog allows millions of combinations.

Only a fraction of those describe a machine HP can actually build and ship. The interface has to make that difference visible before someone prices the wrong thing.

More details about the HP products can be found here: https://na.ingrammicro.com/Ingram/media/North-America-US/EN-US/H/hp/docs/2H24-Benefits-of-IQ-for-HP-Partners-IQ-Section-to-Profit-Section.pdf

I learned the product before I changed it

Partners were quoting through this platform every day. HP needed it running without interruption and improving at the same time.

So I learned HP's design system and the product before touching anything on screen. A designer who reaches for the redesign first is going after the easy work, not the bottleneck.

Everything after that went faster because of it. Beautiful screens are worthless if you do not know the business running underneath them.

Then I brought order

The bottleneck was sitting in the design files. Nobody used auto layout, so every element on every screen had been dragged into position by hand.

Change one button and you open every screen holding it, then move things back into place, file by file. The bigger the platform grew, the more each small decision cost.

I built the reusable components and rebuilt the screens to scale. Change a piece once and every screen using it updates at the same time.

What that changed

A change cost minutes instead of days. New features went out in days rather than being priced in weeks of screen by screen rework.

Every screen stayed consistent with every other screen as the platform kept growing. Nobody waited on design, including engineering and the product owner.

How meetings with me usually went

The product owner opened Figma and pointed at the parts that had to change. Then she moved us into the test environment to walk through the constraints.

By the time she came back to Figma, the design was already finished. Every requirement she listed was done while she was still explaining the environment.

She said she had not expected to find the work finished. I could move at that speed because I already understood the product she was describing.

The part nobody puts in a portfolio

Old interface patterns, screens that had drifted apart over years, and layouts nobody had reviewed since the day they were built.

My scope was new features, not a cleanup. A platform that already sells does not get handed a cleanup budget, and I understood why.

So I designed new work that functions properly while sitting next to problems I was not allowed to touch. Good work inside a scope somebody else set.

The redesign nobody asked for

Veneer is HP's official design system, and in 2022 it reached my part of the business. More than 300 teams use it now, and it won a UX Design Award in 2025.

A design system rollout is a funded reason to touch every screen in a product. Nobody scopes a UX cleanup alone, and every large company eventually scopes compliance.

I had been waiting for that opening since the day I arrived.

What I delivered

I rebuilt the most important CPQ screens on Veneer and showed them to the product manager and upper management. Real screens from our own product instead of an argument in a meeting.

It had to be backward compatible, so partners could adopt it without relearning the tool. That meant knowing exactly which parts people rely on, which is where the year of understanding paid for itself.

I fixed the UX while I was in there. The old problems I had spent months designing around got solved properly inside the new screens.

What I worked on

Rapid SKU. Turns a full configuration into one orderable code instead of dozens of part numbers.

OneConfig. The rules layer. Dependencies, valid and invalid combinations, and parts that attach automatically.

CPQ catalog. Laptops, monitors, and workstations were already quoting through it. I improved those flows continuously.

CPQ printers. Printers were not in the platform at all. I designed that section from nothing.

IQ. Updates and improvements alongside the designer who owned it.

What this means for your team

I learn a complex product before I redraw it, so what I hand over fits what already exists. Nobody at HP had to chase me for screens.

I chose shipping features over fixing old screens, because new features were what kept HP selling. That was a business call, not a design preference.

And when the cleanup finally had a budget attached, I had already built the proof. Give me the product and I will tell you where I would start.