SYSTEM // ACTIVE v3.2 / 2026
CASE 03 // ANYROAD PLATFORM
Case 03 · Product · Enterprise SaaS · 2019 → present

Designing across an entire experiential marketing platform.

Seven years at AnyRoad, growing the design surface area from a single event-management product into a multi-product platform powering branded experiences for global customers. Joined as a Senior Product Designer in 2019. Now Director of Design, leading the work across every surface AnyRoad ships: operations, guest experience, analytics, field activations, and premium loyalty.

Countries
90+
Countries worldwide with experiences powered by AnyRoad.
Yearly bookings
1.3M+
Guest bookings flowing through the platform every year.
Data points / year
15M+
First-party data points captured and analyzed annually.
Average NPS lift
+36
Average post-experience NPS increase across customers.
The arc

From a single event tool to a multi-product platform.

When I joined AnyRoad in 2019 as a Senior Product Designer, the company was a single-product event tool helping a small set of customers run tours and tastings. The thesis was already there: brand experiences create loyal customers, and the data they produce can prove it. But the platform itself was one product, one workflow, one way of working.

Over the next seven years, I led design as that thesis grew into an entire platform. Five distinct product surfaces. Hundreds of customers across 90+ countries. Industries from spirits and brewing to CPG and retail. Brands from Diageo and Anheuser-Busch to Ben & Jerry's, Sierra Nevada, and Just Egg. The same idea: turning experiential marketing from gut feel to measurable program. The surface area to design against grew much larger.

This case is the platform-level view. It walks every product I've shaped: the operational backbone, the guest-facing booking flow, the analytics layer, the field-activation tools, and the premium loyalty programs. Each spotlight is a page in the same book.

"A great enterprise platform answers the operator's job, not the analyst's curiosity."
My role

From individual contributor to design leader, across one company.

— 2019 → 2023

Senior Product Designer.

  • End-to-end design on AnyRoad's core platform
  • Booking, ticketing, registration, and onsite tools
  • Survey authoring and post-event flows
  • Design system contributions and patterns
  • Close partnership with engineering and PM
  • Hands-on in Figma and code on every release
— 2023 → present

Director of Design.

  • Design leadership across the full platform
  • Hiring, mentoring, and structuring the team
  • Design system stewardship as scope expanded
  • Partnering with execs on roadmap and positioning
  • Leading new ventures: Lifetime Loyalty, B-Side
  • Still shipping where the work needs it
— Cross-functional

Who I work with.

  • Product ManagementRoadmap & positioning
  • EngineeringPlatform & data infrastructure
  • ML / Data ScienceAI features & insight generation
  • Customer SuccessOperator research & rollout
  • Marketing & BrandCampaigns & content
The platform map

Five product surfaces, one operating system for branded experiences.

AnyRoad is sold as three products and an outer ring of solutions. Each one answers a different question in the lifecycle of a branded experience, and together they compose into a single operating system. Every spotlight below is a surface I've shaped.

— 01 Operate

Experience Manager

The operational backbone: scheduling, capacity planning, staff tools, walk-up bookings, and revenue tracking for thousands of experiences a year.

Read spotlight →
— 02 Engage

Guest Experience

The guest-facing layer: branded booking flows, two-way messaging, and the first-party data capture that powers everything else downstream.

Read spotlight →
— 03 Understand

Atlas Insights

The data product layer. Five composable surfaces (Question Builder, Explorer, Pinpoint AI, Insights, Industry Benchmarks) that turn raw guest data into operational understanding.

Read deep dive →
— 04 Activate

AnyRoad Live

The field-marketing product: mobile registration, QR scanning, and post-event follow-up for activations, festivals, and pop-ups.

Read spotlight →
— 05 Retain

Lifetime Loyalty

The premium membership division: turn-key membership programs and bottle subscriptions for spirits and CPG brands.

Read spotlight →
Spotlight 01 · Operate

Experience Manager: the platform's operational backbone.

Experience Manager is the surface AnyRoad's operators live in every day. Brand-home staff, distillery managers, retail event leads. They use it to schedule, staff, sell tickets, run the day, and prove the value of a season afterward.

Before this product matured, brand-home teams stitched together booking widgets, spreadsheets, manual headcount, and disconnected POS. The redesign pulled those operations into a single workspace: a calendar that shows the whole season at a glance, capacity warnings that fire before they bite, walk-up booking that takes seconds, and a payment layer that doesn't require IT.

  • Move 01
    Calendar-first scheduling. The day, the week, and the season are one interface. Capacity, staffing, and bookings stack so an operator can read their day in one glance.
  • Move 02
    Walk-up booking in seconds. The front-desk flow is optimized for one operator, one guest, one tap path through ticket type, headcount, and payment.
  • Move 03
    Capacity intelligence. Forecasts and warnings surface before a slot is overbooked. Operators see demand pressure visually, not buried in a report.
Yearly experiences
13,000+
Yearly bookings
1.3M+
Lift in ticket sales
+20%
— Spotlight asset · Coming soon
Experience Manager · Day view
— Spotlight asset · Coming soon
Walk-up booking flow
Spotlight 02 · Engage

Guest Experience: the brand-side first impression.

— Spotlight asset · Coming soon
Branded booking flow
— Spotlight asset · Coming soon
Two-way messaging center

The guest experience starts before they arrive and continues long after they leave. Guest Experience is the surface that wraps that whole arc: the booking flow they see on the brand's site, the confirmation and reminder emails that go out, the messaging thread when they have a question, and the survey that lands in their inbox the next morning.

The design problem here is twofold. The flow has to feel like the brand, not like AnyRoad. And it has to capture the right first-party data without slowing the guest down. The booking flow is fully white-label and configurable. The data capture is calibrated to ask the right questions at the right moment, with opt-ins compliant by default.

  • Move 01
    White-label by default. Every brand gets a booking flow that reads as theirs, without a custom build. Type, color, copy tone, and confirmation flow all configurable.
  • Move 02
    First-party data, intelligently asked. The booking captures the basics; the post-event survey captures the depth. Guests aren't bombarded; the right question shows up at the right moment.
  • Move 03
    Two-way messaging. When a guest has a question, the brand's team gets it in a centralized inbox. No more lost emails, no more "I'll get back to you Monday."
Guest → long-term customer
87%
Revenue per visit lift
+36%
Spotlight 03 · Understand

Atlas Insights: the platform's data product layer.

Atlas Insights is the analytics surface AnyRoad's customers use to turn raw guest data into operational understanding. Five composable surfaces that close the loop from collecting feedback to acting on it: Question Builder, Explorer, Pinpoint AI, Insights, and Industry Benchmarks.

This is the most-detailed surface I've shipped at AnyRoad, and the one with public third-party validation. Diageo's Johnnie Walker Princes Street uses Explorer, Pinpoint, and Industry Benchmarks to prove a 16-point post-visit NPS lift on their flagship whisky tour. The deep dive on each surface lives on its own page.

  • Question Builder
    A question library with standardized + custom types. NPS, Opt-in, Purchase Behavior, and Birthdate ship industry-validated; Custom covers the long tail; conditional logic and translations layer on top.
  • Explorer
    Saveable customer segments, queryable inside the product. A shared segment primitive every other surface inherits.
  • Pinpoint AI
    ML-clustered topics ranked by NPS impact. Open-text feedback at scale, with severity badges and pre/post deltas.
  • Insights
    Auto-narrated weekly executive summary. Composes from the other three surfaces into prose an operator reads on a Monday morning.
  • Industry Benchmarks
    Peer-baseline overlay. Every brand metric shows industry context where the operator already reads it.
Surfaces
5
Marquee NPS lift
+16
Pinpoint AI Topics list · positive and negative topics ranked by NPS impact
— Atlas · Pinpoint AI · Topics list (one of five surfaces)
Insights AI Analysis · weekly executive summary
— Atlas · Insights · Weekly executive summary
— Customer proof · Atlas Insights
Diageo's Johnnie Walker Princes Street used Explorer, Pinpoint, and Industry Benchmarks to prove the impact of a £185M investment.
"With AnyRoad, we are able to measure NPS, Brand Conversion, and more, providing us with solid data that shows the positive impact the JWPS experience is having on our guests. We can then follow up with them to create a lifelong relationship with our brand."
Rob Maxwell · Head of Johnnie Walker Princes Street · Diageo
Post-visit NPS lift
+16
Higher post-visit NPS than pre-visit, validating the multi-sensory tour experience.
Conversion lift
+40%
An historically under-targeted demographic, more likely to drink whisky after visiting.
Diageo investment
£185M
Investment in Scotch whisky tourism across 12 distilleries, with JWPS as the flagship.
Atlas surfaces used
3
Explorer, Feedback Analysis (Pinpoint), and Industry Benchmarks, all cited by name in the Diageo case.
Spotlight 04 · Activate

AnyRoad Live: data capture for field activations and pop-ups.

Brand-home tools are designed for a fixed venue. AnyRoad Live is designed for everywhere else. Festivals, retail pop-ups, sponsorship activations, sampling tours, mobile experiences. Anywhere a brand sets up for a day, a weekend, or a season, and tries to capture data from a crowd that didn't come to be marketed to.

The design problem is speed. A guest at a festival booth has fifteen seconds before they walk away. The Live registration flow has to ask the right thing, capture an opt-in, deliver a follow-up survey hours later, and make the brand's field team look like they ran a clean operation. Mobile-first throughout. QR-driven. Offline-tolerant when the venue's wifi gives up.

  • Move 01
    Mobile-first registration. Optimized for one-handed use on a festival floor. Tap targets sized for thumbs, fields autosized for what the brand actually needs.
  • Move 02
    QR-driven flow. A single QR scan starts the journey. No app to download, no friction between the activation and the data capture.
  • Move 03
    Post-event follow-up automated. The survey arrives hours later, when the guest has had a chance to digest the experience. The brand keeps the relationship alive past the booth.
— Spotlight asset · Coming soon
AnyRoad Live · Mobile registration
— Spotlight asset · Coming soon
QR-driven check-in flow
Spotlight 05 · Retain

Lifetime Loyalty: turning first visits into lifelong members.

— Linked case · Available now
Lifetime Loyalty · 20+ programs
— Linked case · Available now
LL12 x LALIGA · 11,786 members

Lifetime Loyalty is AnyRoad's premium membership division. Where the rest of the platform turns one visit into measurable data, Lifetime Loyalty turns measurable data into recurring revenue. Membership programs, bottle subscriptions, member-only experiences, partner-driven launches.

This branch grew big enough to warrant its own case studies. The parent ecosystem case walks the strategy, the system, and the operating model across 20+ programs. The LL12 x LALIGA case walks a single flagship partnership in detail. Both are linked below.

  • Move 01
    Premium memberships. Annual programs, members-only experiences, early access, VIP launches. Built around brand homes and beyond.
  • Move 02
    Recurring bottle subscriptions. Quarterly shipments of curated, member-exclusive products with nationwide fulfillment.
  • Move 03
    Turn-key program management. AnyRoad runs the program; the brand keeps brand control. Zero additional headcount required.
Programs scaled
20+
Cross-platform system thinking

What made five products feel like one platform.

The compositional bet.

Across seven years and five products, the platform-design decision underneath everything was that the surfaces had to compose, not just coexist. A booking captured in Guest Experience populates the dashboard in Experience Manager and the segment view in Explorer. A topic surfaced in Pinpoint appears inside Insights. A guest from a Live activation lands in the same customer record an LTL membership program will eventually pull from.

That meant we couldn't design surfaces as separate features. They had to be designed against a shared mental model: the same customer, the same segment, the same experience taxonomy. And against a shared interaction grammar so an operator who learned one surface could read all of them.

  • — Principle 01 / Shared customer object A guest profile in Explorer, a verbatim card in Pinpoint, a check-in in Experience Manager, and a member record in Lifetime Loyalty all reference the same underlying customer. One model, surfaced everywhere.
  • — Principle 02 / Segment as a primitive Segments authored in Explorer aren't filter combinations. They're named entities every other surface can reference. Compose once, slice everywhere.
  • — Principle 03 / Consistent NPS visual language Promoter / passive / detractor coloring, and pre/post-visit deltas, look the same in Atlas, Live, and Lifetime Loyalty. The eye learns the system once.
  • — Principle 04 / Synthesis cites synthesis Insights doesn't reinvent topic detection. It cites Pinpoint. Pinpoint doesn't reinvent the response. It cites the survey configured in Question Builder. The chain is legible.
  • — Principle 05 / One design system, not five As the platform grew from one product to five, the design system grew with it. New patterns for data-dense work, mobile field tools, and member-facing surfaces all extended the same foundation rather than forking it. Velocity without divergence.
Question Builder
— 01 / Collect
Explorer
— 02 / Explore
Pinpoint AI
— 03 / Synthesize
Insights
— 04 / Narrate
— Shared spine
Customer · Segment · Experience taxonomy
Leading the design organization

Scaling craft as the platform scaled.

The platform's surface area grew from one product to five. The design org grew with it. Becoming Director of Design in 2023 changed the unit of work from individual screens to the people, systems, and rituals that make screens get made.

Five years as the IC. Two years building the team that does the work now.

From 2019 to 2023 I shipped the work myself, learning the platform, the customers, and the operating model from inside. From 2023 forward I've focused on building the design organization that ships it. Hiring, mentoring, design system stewardship, design culture, and the harder-to-see work of making sure the right decisions get made by the right people.

Below are the four pillars I lead the team against. Each one is a function of the platform getting bigger without the craft getting thinner.

  • — Pillar 01 / Hiring

    Hire for taste, judgment, and care.

    The bar I hire against is straightforward: can this designer hold a high standard for craft, make decisions when the answer isn't obvious, and care about the people they work with. Resumes don't tell me that. Portfolio walkthroughs and a real conversation do.

  • — Pillar 02 / Mentorship

    Coach the decision, not the deliverable.

    The work that compounds isn't a set of files I touched. It's the team's ability to make the same call I would, without me. Mentorship inside my team is mostly about why a decision was made, what was considered and rejected, and how to argue for the better answer.

  • — Pillar 03 / Design system stewardship

    One system, growing without forking.

    As the platform grew from one product to five, the design system had to absorb new pattern needs (data-dense tables, mobile field tools, member-facing branded surfaces) without splintering into incompatible regional dialects. The pattern work is invisible when it succeeds.

  • — Pillar 04 / Critique & culture

    High standards, high warmth.

    The teams I want to be on are honest about the work and generous about the people. I lead critique that pushes hard on the design and stays soft on the designer. Care, craft, and clarity, in that order.

Outcomes

What seven years of platform design has built.

Countries reached
90+
Countries worldwide running experiences powered by AnyRoad.
Yearly bookings
1.3M+
Guest bookings flowing through the platform every year.
Yearly experiences
13K+
Distinct experiences scheduled and operated each year.
Average NPS lift
+36
Average post-experience NPS increase across customers using AnyRoad.
— Brands powered by AnyRoad · A partial list
Diageo Johnnie Walker Absolut Campari Group Anheuser-Busch Sierra Nevada Founders Brewing Anchor Brewing Ben & Jerry's Just Egg Old Dominick Burnt Church Distillery Leiper's Fork OCESA POPLIFE Conversate Collective Horse Country The Flower Shop

— Platform-level outcomes per AnyRoad public reporting · Customer-specific outcomes in individual case studies

Reflection

What seven years across one company taught me about platform design.

Tenure compounds. The work I'm proud of needed years of context.

The seams I'm proudest of (the way a Pinpoint topic appears inside an Insights paragraph, the way a Live activation lands in the same customer record an LTL membership pulls from) couldn't have been designed without years of internal context. Knowing the customer, the operating model, the engineering constraints, the past decisions and the reasons they were made. Tenure is rarely fashionable in design careers, but it's where the most consequential work tends to live.

Going from IC to Director didn't change the question. It changed who answers it.

For five years the question was "what's the right thing to ship?" and I answered it myself. The last two years the question has been the same, but the answer has to come from the team. The shift wasn't from doing to managing. It was from being one decision-maker to building the conditions where many designers can make consistently good decisions in parallel.

The right unit of platform design is the operator's day, not the feature.

Across five products and five years of platform expansion, the question I kept returning to was the same: what does a brand-home director actually do on a Monday morning? Designing against that question pulled the team out of feature-by-feature thinking and into a workflow we could measure end to end. It's also what kept the platform feeling like a platform, not a portfolio of products.