Brazil's first digital car purchasing platform. The project that forced me to think in systems, not screens.
The brief sounded simple: Brazil's first digital car buying platform. Within the first week it was clear this wasn't UI, it was service infrastructure.
I had to orchestrate API, inventory, credit, logistics, and customer emotion at once. A failure in any layer broke everything.
The gap was between what the customer believed and what happened behind the scenes. The old flow was a lead machine: you showed interest, a dealer called weeks later.
"The interface only works if the service works. Every screen was a contract with a backend process that had to exist."
I interviewed the Senior Planner to map the audience and the API engineers to reverse engineer the system's constraints.
This research wasn't validating assumptions, it was discovering what was possible. Without real-time inventory, no real-time selection.
We mapped the journey from consideration to the first week of ownership, with the whole team in the same room.
With no precedent in Brazil, I looked at every market where digital car sales had been attempted.
In every market that worked, the configurator was a confidence ritual, not a funnel.
Before the first pixel, I facilitated a cross-functional workshop. The output wasn't a deliverable, it was a shared mental model the team used for the whole project.
It was the most important decision of the project: investing in alignment before investing in design.
The sketches came after the workshop: what the customer sees first and what decision comes next.
In wireframing came the turn: it wasn't a purchasing flow, it was an ecosystem.
Configurator, calculator, inventory, tracker, and scheduler weren't separate screens. They were states of a single system.
At this stage my role shifted from creator to guardian. The art director executed the visual; I ensured hierarchy, contrast, and progressive disclosure.
The responsibility at this level is not to design every screen, it's to build the conditions where every screen gets designed well.
The design made a complex transaction feel like a considered decision. Not frictionless: navigable. Not minimal: clear.
My FIAT was designing with people and through them, not despite organizational complexity.
The instinct in complex projects is to retreat into individual work. The hard part is creating the conditions for quality to emerge from the room.