Akkadian Provisioning Manager (APM)
Redesigned Akkadian Provisioning Manager (APM), a SaaS communication automation platform. The project involved auditing the existing experience, integrating new features without disrupting core workflows, and aligning user, business, and team goals.
IMPACT
15% ↑ YoY
Increased new product sales
36% ↑ YoY
Increased product renewal subscriptions
My Role
As Akkadian Labs' founding designer and UX team of one, I became the driving force behind a user-centered redesign and integration of the disjointed components of an 8-year-old communication provisioning tool.
Timeline
1 year
Tools
Pen and Paper, Paper, XD, Sketch, InVision, and Zeplin
About APM
Akkadian Labs builds enterprise software for Cisco and Microsoft Unified Communications (UC) environments.
Its flagship product, Akkadian Provisioning Manager (APM), helps IT teams automate the complex process of managing users, devices, and services across large communication systems - reducing the time required from 30 minutes to just 30 seconds.
This case study documents the evolution of APM 4 into APM 5, a full product redesign that improved usability, modernized the interface, and better aligned business, user, and team goals.
Problem
Provisioning in the UC space, often referred to as MAC-Ds (moves, adds, changes, deletes), is traditionally slow, complex, and error-prone.
Administrators and provisioners must manage settings across multiple servers, clusters, and applications, which frequently leads to inconsistencies, rework, and user frustration.
Despite APM’s powerful automation capabilities, users struggled with unclear content, a confusing dashboard, poor reporting, and an overall lack of intuitiveness. Competitors were winning deals simply because their products looked better and were easier to learn.
Vision
The goal was to redesign APM without disrupting existing workflows while making the product more intuitive, modern, and user-centered.
I set out to better align business objectives, user needs, and internal priorities through research-driven design.
The vision focused on:
-
Simplifying complex workflows
-
Improving learnability
-
Creating a scalable design system that could support long-term product growth
Solution
Through extensive research, including stakeholder interviews and user interviews, competitive analysis, and usability testing, I identified key pain points and opportunities.
New personas, user journeys, and workflows helped shift internal conversations toward user-centered decision-making.
The redesign introduced clearer content, an improved dashboard, better reporting, a modern UI, and a major new feature, Search Services, that enabled users to perform MAC-D tasks faster and more intuitively.
A new design system and content library ensured consistency, accessibility, and scalability across the product.