The Archipelago platform

Understand your building data, get better insurance

I started & helped grow the design team, & was the sole or lead designer on almost every major project for the company's first 4 years.

A screenshot of the "stream" page UI.
A screenshot of the building detail UI.
A screenshot of an evidentiary document being highlighted.

Click the image above to embiggen & see notes.

Archipelago provides an online platform for commercial real estate insurance, which serves both owners & insurers. Owners can record hundreds of data points on each of thousands of buildings, and insurers can trust the data due to evidentiary documents.

I started & helped grow the design team, & was involved in almost every major project for the company's first 4 years. I'd like to highlight a couple that I'm especially proud of:

A screenshot of the very first version of the Archipelago platform.
The initial launch version of a building detail UI.
An early version of the information architecture.
An early version of a portfolio.
An early concept for looking at the details of a single building.

Click the image above to embiggen & see notes.

Initial product launch

Project brief: Archipelago's founders had pitched investors on a concept; now turn that into working software. Critically, our pilot customer had a go‑live date that could not be moved, which was a make‑or‑break event for Archipelago.

My role: I transformed their vision into an MVP design. I held frequent meetings with Archipelago executives & flagship customers to understand the problem space and iterate on product directions. I was the sole designer at the company for the initial phase of this project, with a second designer joining partway through.

Outcome: A successful launch! The customer's go-live date went smoothly, and resulted in ~90% of potential insurer customers being introduced to Archipelago.

We solicited feedback from our pilot customer, which was uniformly positive. They were receiving praise from insurers for making their data understandable & trustable, with specific notes given for how easy the Archipelago platform was to navigate.

In addition, those insurers reached out directly to Archipelago, which led to signing deals with 2 of the largest insurers in the world over the following year.

A schematic workflow diagram of the editing process.
A screenshot of the UI to start editing.
A screenshot of the UI showing errors during data validation.

Click the image above to embiggen & see notes.

Editing

Project brief: Enable customers to directly edit their own data. (Prior to this, all data management was done through our internal tooling.)

My role: I was the sole designer (and sometimes PM!) on this project. I first gathered requirements from internal experts & customers, then identified a long-term vision & the shorter-term MVP.

Focused on the MVP scope, I outlined a workflow that would integrate with our existing infrastructure. I designed the accompanying interfaces & validated with customers. Finally, I worked closely with engineering to adjust designs to work with limited development bandwidth.

Outcome: We deployed an MVP editing capability, which allowed customers to self-serve their most common use cases, an estimated 20% of all edits. This both reduced the workload on our internal data management team, and unblocked 10 sales motions.

Since I had designed the MVP with the longer-term vision in mind, the implementation was built to be forward-compatible, reducing the time for the upgrades shipped over the following year.