AIRSPACE · INTERNAL PLATFORM
Rebuilding a pricing system to scale with the business
At Airspace, I was the lead designer and project manager for a full suite of pricing features to address business and user needs. The project spanned two workstreams: Partnering with engineers to reshape the backend pricing architecture, and leading frontend redesign of three core features.
Impact
In the two months following a targeted rollout, the new pricing system reduced post-order changes for third-party (drivers, airlines, etc.) costs by 30%. This improvement stemmed from enhanced accuracy in system-calculated prices and empowering different teams to manage pricing proactively.
Core Team
1 Designer (me), 5 Developers, 1 Product Manager
Role
Product Designer (lead) + Project Management
Duration
15 months | Aug 2024 – Nov 2025
Note: Certain details and the full process for the project are omitted due to an NDA. if you want to learn more.
Project Brief
The Context
What is Airspace?
Airspace is a time-critical logistics company that specializes in shipping high-stakes items (surgical instruments, airplane parts, biological samples) for industries like aerospace and healthcare.
How Pricing Works
How pricing works at Airspace is simple in theory, but gets complex with sprawl
Customers and 3rd parties sign on with Airspace
Customer places order
Two sets of pricing generated
Active order modifications
Post delivery actions
With hundreds of diverse pricing agreements and a wide variety of shipment types, pricing permutations end up varying greatly across all orders.
The Business Problem
The pricing engine couldn't keep up with business complexity
Airspace's pricing engine, which housed the pricing agreements and generated customer charges and expenses for each order, was built to support a set of standard pricing structures.
As pricing agreements became more complex, R&D couldn't keep pace to account for all the new requirements. This resource strain forced the business to rely on manual workarounds to accommodate growth.
These challenges manifested in different ways:
Costly invoicing errors
Constant revenue & expense adjustments
Added contractor spend
Delayed margin visibility
The Pivot Point
I advocated to think broadly on tackling the entire pricing ecosystem, as issues often overlapped across features
From an initial project brief on rebuilding the pricing engine, it was already clear this couldn't happen in a vacuum. Pricing features were interconnected with one another, and there had been accumulated user pains that stemmed from issues across those features.
I layered these in early scoping conversations, drawing pain points to related features to highlight the overlap and the need to think more holistically.
Merging the engine vision with these ecosystem-wide needs allowed our team to expand our scope from a simple fix to a comprehensive pricing ecosystem overhaul.
The Challenge
How might we redesign the pricing ecosystem to make it flexible, scalable, and honest to how the business operates?
Design Process
My Involvement
My contributions spanned two workstreams
- Collaborated with the head of pricing to align on requirements from their architectural vision of the pricing engine
- Led working sessions with developers to brainstorm and establish backend requirements from user stories across four features
- Pitched six changes across four backend-heavy features, partnering with backend developers to implement the changes and iterate based on stakeholder feedback
- Partnered with stakeholders to discuss tradeoffs of implementing short term solutions to meet project timeline
- Audited 100+ real-world pricing scenarios against the new engine architecture to stress-test coverage and identify gaps
- Identified and pitched additions for five pivotal configurations to support common pricing scenarios
- Drove rollout coordination by issuing rollout plans, assessing cross-team impact, and creating two training guides across finance, analytics, driver ops, and rate administration ahead of release
Conclusion
Results & Impact
The pricing ecosystem scaled to handle business complexity
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