Silo's original navigation was built around two roles: buying and selling. As the platform grew, that structure stopped working, forcing a completely different, isolated view every time someone switched roles. I drove a design-led initiative to raise awareness of the problem and overhaul the IA, without breaking the workflows our users depend on.
As Silo moved to a more modular product strategy, each new product area needed its own place to live, and the original role-based navigation had none to give. Accounting tangled with capital, inventory pulled away from orders, and the structure had nowhere left to grow.
A more modular product strategy meant more offerings, and a real risk: every new feature had nowhere to land.
Before it got worse, users needed a more flexible experience, one that put what they actually needed within easy reach.
As a passion project, the hard part wasn't the design. It was building enough momentum to earn a spot on the roadmap, then getting users comfortable with the change once it shipped.
We ran two card-sorting exercises with product, design, and engineering leads, each sorting based on what their own product focus area actually needed. That moved us from divergent ideas to a convergent structure.
With a stronger approach from all the iterations and feedback, it was time to apply the new navigation across the whole platform, and make sure it didn't break a single workflow.
We went page by page, Orders, Warehouse, Logistics, Finance, Reports, mapping what moved where.
Feature parity was the rule: nothing users relied on could quietly disappear in the new IA.
With most of our users Spanish speaking or dual language, translations weren't an afterthought, they were updated across every main page component alongside everything else.
Most of our users came from a pen-and-paper background, using digital software at all was already a stretch for them. Any change to a tool they'd finally gotten comfortable with was going to be hard. We had to give engineering time to maintain both navigations until everyone felt ready to let the old one go. For long-standing customers, customer success stayed in touch throughout, real conversations, not just in-app messaging, so they felt cared for, not just notified.
In-app onboarding with a video walking through the benefits and updates.
Move everyone not already on it, with an in-app update that we're sunsetting the old one.
A final in-app update: the official switch is here, and users can no longer revert back.
A persistent, scalable structure with the things users asked for, surfaced where they need them, and flexible enough to grow with the product.
Organizing Finance was an ongoing battle, those product owners wanted a separate navigation entirely.
It didn't make sense to build a separate experience for engineering to maintain, so we folded Capital under Finance until that line had clearer direction.
A universal change meant a lot of gnarly bugs surfaced as we built.
Their attitude was indifferent, but we knew they were resistant to change. The game plan: