Portfolio Manager

Simplifying hotel onboarding and data management by centralizing dashboards, introducing brand standards, and delivering scalable workflows for faster, more efficient operations.

→ Role
Senior Product Designer

→ Platform
Desktop

→ Year
2025

About the product

ALICE is a comprehensive product that improves operational efficiency and communication within the hospitality industry, contributing to better productivity and higher guest satisfaction. The mobile app supports various departments, from Engineering to Housekeeping, ensuring guest requests are handled promptly and consistently. No reliance to radios, paper, pens, or physical contact.

Strategic Goals & Impact

  • Cut churn 20% year over year

  • Enterprise readiness with a best-in-class Portfolio Manager, essential for winning and retaining large clients with reporting needs.

  • Growth enablement to drive 2026 enterprise contracts and position Alice as the choice for Marriott, Mandarin, and others.

  • Operational efficiency by reducing onboarding from months to hours and improving data consistency.

Team

  • Product Manager: Dalton Wilson

  • SVP of Product: Chris Kluis

  • Designer Team: Felipe Miranda, Guilherme Lencin

  • Engineering Manager: Oleg Chervonogradsky

  • Engineers: Fernando Silva, Pavel Minin, Darren Nelsen, Anton Kosyakin

My Role

Responsibilities: UX research, co-facilitating a design workshop to frame the problem and opportunities, information architecture, UI design, prototyping, and Maze setup.

Problem

Enterprise customers struggled with the legacy Portfolio Manager. Corporate Champions, those responsible for managing groups of hotels, were overwhelmed and frustrated:

  • Management burden with manual setup and upkeep for every facility and service.

  • Dependence on specialized knowledge or a Customer Success Manager

  • Inefficient multi-property updates

  • Poor Usability with confusing navigation, unintuitive UI, and difficulty finding critical information

This made sales harder, with even current clients reporting needed to “hire an ALICE expert” to manage the system.

The lack of structure not only hurt usability but also weakened ALICE’s competitive positioning, increasing churn risk and making it harder to close enterprise deals.

Design Outcome

  • The Portfolio Manager delivers a solution that empowers Hotel Corporate Champions to efficiently manage enterprise portfolios through a centralized management dashboard, standardized service templates, streamlined multi-property updates, improved navigation and interface, and a scalable foundation for advanced AI features.

Users & Roles

  • Corporate Champions: The primary users, managing groups of hotels across brands.

  • Customer Success Managers (CSMs): Supported Champions by managing portfolio updates.

Context

Larger customers, such as Accor, found it nearly impossible to manage portfolios of brands and properties. Frustrated Corporate Champions struggled with inefficient workflows and cumbersome onboarding, increasing the risk of client churn.

Legacy Portfolio Manager

Design Sprint & Workshop

Over three days, we ran a design sprint with internal stakeholders, including the VP of Product, Product Manager, and CSM, to explore the problem and align on opportunities. Together, we:

  • Mapped the challenge with exercises such as How Might We and Affinity Mapping.

  • Defined the opportunity into a clear problem statement.

  • Ideated potential directions with free sketches in Miro.

  • Prototyped an initial AI-assisted concept to frame the long-term vision.

Design Sprint Activities: Challenges, HMW, and First Ideation

User Flows

To visualize pain points and improvements, we created before-and-after user flows:

  • Before: CSMs had to copy existing portfolio managers, and Corporate Champions then had to manually adjust them to their operations, editing facilities and services for sub-brands and individual hotels. The process was tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming.

  • After: Corporate Champions could quickly set up their Portfolio Manager with the relevant services for each facility through a guided, intuitive flow, making onboarding faster, easier, and less error-prone.

User Flow - Before

User Flow - New and Improved

Then we worked on the first prototype using V0. At this stage, our solution focused on helping Corporate Champions configure services under each department more quickly. We introduced a guided step-by-step process to make setup easier and more structured.

However, even with this improvement, the workload still fell heavily on the Corporate Champion. It was a useful first attempt, but ultimately too cumbersome, and it helped us see the need for a more scalable solution in the next iteration.

User Flow - Before

The Redesigned Experience

The redesigned Portfolio Manager introduced:

  • Templates enable automatic inheritance of brand-level facilities and services

  • Streamlined updates with bulk actions across hotels

  • Improved usability with clearer navigation, fewer clicks, and simplified onboarding

Design Challenges

Key challenges shaped our design approach:

  • Complexity of Enterprise Needs: The solution had to scale across large hotel groups while maintaining flexibility for individual properties. Tables with long content required search, sorting, and other tools to keep data manageable and usable.

  • Corporate Champion Workload: Early prototypes still overloaded Corporate Champions, even with guided flows. We focused on automation and smarter defaults to reduce friction.

  • Legacy System Limitations: We needed to rethink outdated structures while ensuring smooth integration with existing workflows and data.

  • Competing Priorities: Different user types (corporate champions, property-level users, and implementation teams) had conflicting needs, requiring careful prioritization.

These challenges guided our iterations and directly informed the final solution.

Validation

The usability test was totally focused on understanding whether or not (how easy) it would be for Corporate Managers to use the system without support from Actabl. The goal is to collect feedback from real users and validate early design decisions before implementation.

I built testable prototypes in Figma Make and integrated them into Maze to facilitate usability testing.

Task 1 of 3 - Tested the usability of bulk-enabling facility services at the brand level.

Results & Next Steps

While I'm not involved with the project, the focus continues:

  • Validate with users and stakeholders that we're solving the right problems.

  • Product to significantly reduce onboarding time, improve reporting accuracy, and position ALICE as enterprise-ready.

  • Future work should possible include integrating AI-driven insights and expanding customization at the brand/hotel level.

Learnings

  • Co-running workshops with stakeholders helped align priorities early and reduce rework.

  • Visualizing before/after flows was critical to communicate design value.

  • Building Maze prototypes enables the team to get actionable user feedback, confirming that the solution addressed key frustrations.

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