How ownership gets designed in

the work that doesn’t end at handoff

Pilotly is a SaaS market research platform doing media testing for major studios like Amazon, Disney, and Netflix. Sentiment Analysis is the page where every study gets analyzed — a primary driver of how quickly we deliver client-ready insights.

But the redesign wasn’t the only thing on the table. Within our small team, engineering kept getting pulled into projects too late — seeing tickets or designs for the first time during build, or defining scope after development was underway.

the ideal timeline

As both design and product lead on Sentiment, I had the autonomy to test a different approach. I designed a 6-phase handoff process that pulled engineers in roughly six weeks before development started, and used the Sentiment Analysis redesign as the proof point.

The phases that mattered most:

bringing eng. leadership in

The Director of Eng and VP of Product previewed the roadmap and designs, which gave me the opportunity to get buy-in early on while there was still time to iterate.

from informed to owners

The full engineering team explored implementation paths and drafted technical architecture before kickoff, reinforcing their ownership over the project.

locking in scope

Final designs were build-ready, tech-aligned, and client-approved before any development started.

Spoiler alert: we had a sort of plot twist to un-twist here– more on that later.

putting it to work on delta sentiment

Delta Sentiment cleared four years of accumulated debt on the legacy “Classic” experience — jarring reloads on every action, unreadable tune-out exports, clunky aggregation, and no way to copy traces across cells.

the secure share

A client asked for the ability to share insights with internal stakeholders who didn’t have Pilotly access. The team converged on a flow with email + code authentication. Then a late client review pushed us back to a simpler password-protected link.

The process kept channels open enough that we caught the misalignment and pivoted fast. The lesson stuck: client-facing features need client alignment in Phase 2, not Phase 4.

the receipts

We’ve slowly been migrating from our legacy “Classic” experience to our updated “Delta” experience. We’re also still working on adding all of the features in Sentiment Analysis to Delta, which means both experiences are still accessible to the user.

This can be worrisome as users are less likely to learn a new experience when they have their tried and true available to them. However, we found that this wasn’t the case with Delta Sentiment.

what i took with me

This process was a V1 case study for how the team can move forward in the future. Based on what the team taught me in retro, for V2, we’d:

The biggest lesson I learned:

Prior to this, I was limited to leading the design part of product design. I learned how to justify my designs, how to tactfully present my designs to different stakeholders, and how to make people feel heard.

As I got more experience, I got more responsibility. One of these responsibilities is actual project planning and product management. With how cross-functional my days were getting, I learned that having ownership isn’t something I just start doing in the same way that learning autolayout in Figma is.