Orchestrating a transformation of enterprise rental workflows: integrating
legacy systems, streamlining onboarding, and enabling scalable payment
and reservation tracking in the Phoenix platform.
My role: Lead Product Designer
Scope: Algorithmic Pattern Design
Duration: June 2024- Ongoing
Context
Ryder is a leader in commercial fleet management and truck rental, with thousands of B2B customers relying on its systems to keep operations moving. The Phoenix platform is Ryder’s core customer experience layer, connecting everything from rentals and billing to organizational management and credit applications.
Objective: Build a unified, intuitive, and scalable platform that:
Gives customers self-service control over their accounts.
Streamlines complex enterprise workflows (rentals, credit, billing).
Reduces support load by empowering users to solve problems without calling support.
Challenge
Before Phoenix, Ryder’s customer experience was fragmented:
Multiple touchpoints: Customers had to email or call Ryder for simple tasks like adding users or checking credit status.
Limited transparency: Customers couldn’t easily track documents or billing profile connections.
High support burden: Account managers were spending time on manual updates rather than strategic support.
Design Question: How might we create a single, cohesive platform that puts customers in control of their accounts while keeping enterprise compliance intact?
Opportunity
Phoenix wasn’t just a portal — it was an opportunity to transform Ryder’s relationship with customers:
Self-service at scale: Allow businesses to manage users, accounts, and credit independently.
Operational efficiency: Free Ryder employees from low-value admin work.
Stronger customer loyalty: Deliver an experience that feels as seamless as consumer-grade software but meets enterprise needs.
Approach
Designing Phoenix wasn’t just about shipping software- it was about building a unified, scalable customer experience layer for Ryder. My approach combined systems thinking, user research, and agile collaboration:
Map the System, Not Just the Screens
I began by creating end-to-end journey maps and operational swim lanes for rentals, credit applications, and user management. This uncovered:
Hidden dependencies (example: billing profiles tied to credit limits).
Compliance rules that needed to be surfaced earlier in the flow.
Opportunities for smart defaults to reduce user effort.
Research & Validation
I conducted interviews and usability tests with Ryder customers and internal teams to ground decisions in real needs. Each iteration focused on:
Simplifying complex tasks (like inviting users or requesting credit).
Reducing cognitive load with clear messaging and progressive disclosure.
Closing the feedback loop with Medallia data so the design stayed responsive to customer pain points.
Used iterative curation to filter out the noise and surface silhouettes that balanced provocation with wearability.
3. Collaborative Prototyping & Workshops
I used Figma as a live collaboration hub, bringing product managers, engineers, and legal/compliance into the process early:
Built interactive prototypes to stress-test business rules and edge cases.
Facilitated design reviews and alignment workshops to ensure everyone had a shared mental model of the solution.
Documented business logic for faster developer handoff.
Design Ops & Iterative Delivery
To keep Phoenix scalable, I:
Established component libraries and naming conventions to speed future work.
Created a single source of truth for flows, legal messaging, and copy.
Ran multiple design-test-iterate cycles before launch, tightening usability with each sprint.
Design
1.Self-Service Invite & Role Management
Customers can invite, remove, and manage team members directly within the platform.
Role-based permissions and clear disclaimers ensure compliance and prevent accidental access.
2.Integrated Payment Management
Added the ability to view, update, and manage payment methods without contacting support.
Designed a clear hierarchy for billing profiles and account-level payments to reduce confusion.
3.Smart Defaults & Progressive Disclosure
Pre-select business hours and hide non-critical data until needed to reduce cognitive load.
Key features
The Phoenix platform now serves as a self-service control center for Ryder customers, with features designed for speed, clarity, and control:
Team Management
Invite, remove, and manage team members with role-based permissions, ensuring the right people have the right access.
Role-specific access minimizes risk and improves internal accountability.
Audit logs let admins track who made changes and when.
Payment & Billing Management
Add and update payment methods, view billing profiles, and manage invoices- all without calling support.
Hierarchy view clarifies which billing profiles tie to which accounts.
Inline validation prevents incorrect payment data from blocking reservations.
Reservation Tracking Grid
A centralized grid view displaying all active, upcoming, and past reservations with real-time statuses, key details (vehicle type, pickup/return dates, location), and action buttons for modifying or canceling reservations.
Color-coded status chips (Reserved, Active, Returned, Cancelled).
Filters, search, and inline actions for fast management.
Multi-State Dashboard
Personalized rental experience based on account status- from logged-out users to those with multiple billing profiles- improving conversion and clarity.
Personalization allows for clarity in the next steps for users at different maturity levels.
Products & Categories Page
A fully re-architected products experience, allowing customers to browse Ryder’s offerings by category, compare products, and initiate reservations from the same page.
Clear taxonomy for trucks, trailers, and specialty equipment.
Responsive design for easy browsing across desktop and mobile.
Behind the build
Phoenix wasn’t just a design project. It was a platform orchestration challenge with real-world constraints. My job was to make Ryder’s complex ecosystem simple and empowering for customers while respecting legacy infrastructure, compliance rules, and business dependencies.
Mapping the Ecosystem & Constraints
I began by mapping the entire customer journey across rentals, credit, and account management, including the messy reality of legacy tools.
Identified dependencies: which services couldn’t be modernized yet and how they impacted UX.
Flagged compliance and legal requirements that dictated certain flows.
Prioritized what to reimagine vs. what to harmonize with existing back-end logic.
This became a living service blueprint that highlighted not just user pain points, but technical and regulatory constraints we had to design around.
Defining Design Principles for a Constrained System
I set guiding principles to keep the experience cohesive despite technical limitations:
Empower the Customer even when back-end workflows were partially manual.
Design for Transparency so users could see what was happening behind the scenes.
Future-Proof Patterns so as Ryder modernizes its systems, the front-end could scale without a redesign.
Finding Leverage Points in a Legacy Environment
I focused on interventions that created maximum customer value with minimal back-end disruption:Reservation Tracking Grid was built to consume data from multiple legacy sources but presented in a single unified view.
Team Management & Payments leveraged existing APIs but wrapped them in a modern permissioning model.
Prototyping & Edge-Case Testing
I built clickable prototypes with dozens of screens per flow, and we
Simulated edge cases like expired billing profiles, credit holds, and multiple admin roles.
Aligned with engineering early to ensure feasibility within legacy constraints.
Design Ops & Documentation
I set up component libraries, design tokens, and flow documentation to ensure that future Phoenix iterations could reuse patterns without breaking compliance or legacy dependencies.
Reflection
This project reminded me that design is as much about letting go as it is about control. Working with algorithms meant embracing unpredictability, allowing systems to surprise me rather than forcing outcomes. The role of the designer shifts here, from maker to curator, from controlling every line to shaping the dialogue between human intention and machine output.
This project also sharpened my perspective on where fashion can go next. It’s not just about garments that look different; it’s about processes that waste less, imagine faster, and reflect identity in new ways. For me, this was a statement about how design itself is evolving: toward systems, toward hybridity, toward futures we haven’t yet fully imagined.
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