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AIRSPACE · INTERNAL PLATFORM

Rebuilding a pricing system to scale with the business

Preview of the redesigned pricing backend and order pricing UI

At Airspace, I was the lead designer and project manager for a full suite of pricing features to address business and user needs. My work spanned two work streams: Partnering with engineers to reshape the backend architecture, and leading the UI 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 costs 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

Backend strategy: June 2024 - Nov. 2025 UI redesign: Feb. 2025 - Nov. 2025

Note: 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 (such as surgical instruments, airplane parts, biological samples) for a variety of industries like aerospace and healthcare.

How Pricing Works

How pricing works at Airspace is simple in theory, but gets complex with sprawl

01. Customers and 3rd parties sign on with Airspace

Pricing agreements (contains a set of rates) are set up for each group in desktop platform

02. Customer places order

Order is submitted to Airspace

03. Two sets of pricing generated

Customer charges (what Airspace bills the customer) and expenses (estimates to pay to 3rd parties, ex. drivers or airlines)

04. Active order modifications

As order progresses, pricing can change and gets updated automatically or by the operations team

05. Post delivery actions

Orders are audited for accuracy, customers are billed, expenses are paid, margin (difference of customer charges + expense) is finalized

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 backend couldn't keep up with business complexity

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

Inaccurate pricing logic led to material billing errors on customer accounts

Constant revenue & expense adjustments

A disproportionate amount of time was spent by different teams to correct pricing

Added contractor spend

Outside resourcing was brought in specifically to keep up with manual correction volume

Delayed margin visibility

The business faced a meaningful lag before it could assess accurate gross margin

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 to rebuild the pricing backend, it was already clear the work 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 across related features to highlight the overlap and the need to think more holistically.

Merging the backend 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 then spanned two work streams

  • Collaborated with the head of pricing to understand their pricing strategy and how that could translate to system changes
  • Led working sessions with developers to brainstorm and establish backend requirements from user stories across four backend features
  • Pitched six changes across the four backend features, partnering with 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 backend 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
The full process for the project are omitted due to an NDA. if you want to learn more.

Conclusion

Results & Impact

The pricing ecosystem scaled to handle business complexity

30% reduction in post-order expense adjustments after 2 months of release
Hours → Minutes velocity for rate admins to set up pricing agreements
Significant reduction in weekly manual adjustment time for closeout specialists to correct third party
71% increase in dev speed to iterate on pricing engine data, from an avg. of 1 week to 2 days
Over 50 pricing settings available from day one, enabling the pricing department to handle diverse needs independently without engineering support

Can't get enough of my work?

Well you're in luck—here's another project 
you can read up on ➡️

Scaling pricing to charge for diverse requirements
Full Case Study

AIRSPACE · INTERNAL PLATFORM

Scaling pricing to charge for diverse requirements

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