6 weeks. 3 user narratives. A validated prototype and a new workshop technique that spread across the organization.
Rolls Royce's Nuclear Division needed a unified SaaS platform to consolidate separate maintenance, supply chain, and inventory services for nuclear utilities. It was 2018: no Figma multiplayer, no Miro, no shared digital canvas. Remote collaboration was a genuine unsolved problem, and we were a six-person cross-functional team (UX, research, data science, and program management) working across time zones with a remote client. I served as both UX lead and product manager for the engagement, drove all client engagement and workshops, co-developed a virtual whiteboard technique that became a formal addition to the Uptake UX team's toolkit, and delivered a fully interactive prototype validated by Rolls Royce Nuclear executives. The contract wasn't renewed. The method was.
Nuclear utilities run on precision. Maintenance work that happens too early wastes budget. Maintenance that happens too late creates safety and regulatory exposure. The space between those two outcomes is where Rolls Royce's Nuclear Division had an opportunity.
They approached Uptake with a SaaS partnership: combine several separate services (maintenance planning, supply chain management, obsolescence tracking, inventory) into a single platform that would help utilities perform the right work at the right time at the right price. The business case was real. The challenge was defining what that product actually was.
We had six weeks to go from nothing to a validated interactive prototype. The client was remote. The year was 2018, before COVID normalized distributed collaboration, before Figma multiplayer existed, before Miro was standard practice. We were working across time zones with no shared digital canvas and a design system we couldn't deviate from.
Three constraints shaped everything.
The first was time: six weeks to define strategy, gather requirements, design, and validate. The second was scope: Uptake's existing design system was the foundation. We could extend it (and did, with a dark theme the client requested to match their existing software environment), but we couldn't introduce new patterns or invent new treatments from scratch. The third was distance: the client was remote and the tooling that makes remote collaboration intuitive today didn't exist yet.
The design system constraint was actually clarifying. Rather than exploring surface-level decisions, we had to direct creative energy toward architecture, narrative, and the user tasks the product had to support.
Workshop: Empathy Mapping and Requirements (Days 1–2)
We opened a two-day on-site workshop with empathy mapping to establish shared understanding of who we were designing for. Nuclear utility software is often built around systems (SAP, Maximo) rather than people. We wanted to ground the work in jobs, goals, and the daily pressure each role was navigating before we ever touched a requirement.
Three primary users emerged. The Maintenance Planner plans elective, preventive, and corrective maintenance in an EMS system. Their goal: optimize scope of work for the week based on priority and grace periods. This is where cost and safety tension lives most explicitly. A grace period deferred too long becomes a compliance issue. A grace period acted on too early is budget waste. The Maintenance Scheduler schedules the parts and people identified by the Planner. Their goal: ensure parts and staff are available to complete the identified work. A plan without parts is a missed commitment. The Material Analyst buys parts for planned work and sells excess inventory. Their goal: ensure the right stock at the right time at the right price. Secondary users included Engineers, Project Managers, and Executives.
With user definitions aligned, we moved directly into requirements mapping: connecting Rolls Royce's functional requirements to the specific moments in each user's workflow where those capabilities would land. This wasn't a features list. It was a translation exercise, and doing it in the same workshop kept the user context live while we worked through the business logic.
By the end of day two, we had alignment on user definitions, rough JTBD, capability areas, and a mapped requirements foundation the prototype could build from.
Virtual Whiteboard Sessions
The remote requirements work introduced the biggest creative challenge: how do you iterate visually with a client when you can't share a canvas?
I developed an approach Uptake hadn't used before. I called it Virtual Whiteboard. During three 2-hour remote sessions, I facilitated conversation while an Interaction Designer sketched directly in Google Slides, building rough visual concepts in real time as we discussed each feature or use case. The sketches weren't meant to be polished. They were meant to be fast enough to interrogate. Seeing a rough layout of a concept on screen changed the quality of the feedback immediately. Clients could say "that's not quite it" or "yes, but what if the priority column was here" in a way that's impossible with words alone.
The technique was formally recognized at an Uptake UX team All Hands and subsequently adopted by several other teams across the organization.
Design Iteration
Over the following weeks, we held remote and in-person weekly design reviews and iteration sessions. The Virtual Whiteboard sketches evolved into pencil sketches, then into a low-fidelity interactive prototype in Axure, then into a fully interactive, dark-theme prototype we could put in front of users.
The dark theme wasn't a stylistic choice on our end. Rolls Royce requested it to align with the software environment their users already worked in. It was an extension of Uptake's design system rather than a departure from it: same structural logic, new visual mode.
Three Narratives
- A Maintenance Planner identifies a demand and takes action, navigating the tension between safety-critical timelines and cost optimization.
- A Material Analyst identifies and approves an excess inventory opportunity.
- A Project Manager or Executive reviews platform effectiveness and value metrics.
The prototype was ready for end-user and executive validation when the client contract wasn't renewed. The work stopped before formal testing.
What continued: the Virtual Whiteboard technique. Formally recognized, formally adopted, and used across multiple Uptake project teams after this engagement.
Remote collaboration is a solved problem now. In 2018 it wasn't. The Virtual Whiteboard worked because it respected how people actually process visual information: you can't describe your way to alignment on a complex interface. You have to see something, even something rough, to know what you actually think. The nuclear context made every framing decision matter more than usual. Maintenance planning isn't just an efficiency problem in this industry. Deferred work has safety and regulatory consequences. The dashboards and prioritization logic we designed had to hold both cost pressure and safety obligation in the same frame, visible at the same time, without one obscuring the other. That's not a design pattern question. That's a product strategy question that design has to answer.