Zeelo. Turning a compliance process held together by email and goodwill into something that works at scale.

It was: what does this product look like in three years?

I spent time with that before narrowing to what could ship. A three-year operator platform would let operators self-manage drivers and vehicles, handle their own compliance, see performance data, allocate jobs without going through Zeelo ops at all. That vision shaped every scoping decision that followed. None of it works without a clean foundation. The first thing to design was the ground floor.

Discovery sessions with Melissa Parnaby (Operations Specialist), Alice Lane (Senior Operations Manager South), and Tom Kinsey (Senior Operations Manager North). Melissa described tracking operator information across four parallel systems simultaneously. The default was chasing: emails, calls, more emails. Sometimes operators started running trips before their compliance was confirmed.

The reframe came out of these sessions: onboarding wasn't a step to get through, it was the entry point to an ongoing compliance relationship. Design it as a form and you solve the first interaction. Design it as a system and you solve the relationship.

Before designing any UI, I mapped how compliance state would flow between the portal and Mission Control: what an operator profile must carry, what ops needs to see without opening a record, what happens when a document is rejected and why that rejection has to carry a reason. The model came first, the screens followed.

The riskiest unknown was whether operators would self-serve at all. Phase 1 had to prove that account activation could happen without an ops specialist holding hands. Phase 2 was operator-side compliance management, designed to be the next bet only if phase 1 earned belief. Everything else was deferred to subsequent phases, gated on what the foundation proved.

Ship the cheapest thing that validates the riskiest assumption first. Defer anything that adds moderation, legal or build overhead until the prior phase earns it.

Hypothesis: operators would prefer to complete everything in one sitting and be done.

The first prototype asked for full compliance data during onboarding: insurance details, coverage amounts, expiry dates, vehicle documentation. Usability testing with four UK operators (Landflight, Centrebus, Wheelers, Charlise), run from a corner of the open office because no meeting rooms were available, killed it fast. Operators hesitated, got stuck, dropped off. Too much to have ready in a single session.

Hypothesis: separating activation from compliance would lift completion on both.

Onboarding collected only what was needed to vet and activate: account setup, contact details, fleet information. Compliance documents moved to a dedicated portal phase post-activation. The original approach had conflated two distinct moments, becoming an operator and staying compliant as one. Separating them made both better.

When a document failed validation, the original spec marked it Rejected and stopped. I pushed for a mandatory written note from ops explaining why. Engineering pushed back: we were close to the edge of what could ship in the first release.

I held on it. Without a reason, operators re-upload the wrong version. Another review cycle. Another round of emails. The note closed the loop without a phone call. It stayed.

UK and US compliance requirements differ enough that a single generalised form would have forced operators to self-identify applicable fields mid-flow. We built two flows, shared components, different requirements.

The asymmetry that mattered: in the US, if a driver is in an incident, it's on Zeelo, not the operator's insurer. That had to be reflected in what we collected. The US flow includes a Certificate of Insurance section with Zeelo's address pre-filled as certificate holder. Operators know exactly what to upload and why.

The three-stage structure held in testing. The specific language didn't.

MPOC ('Main Point of Contact') caused confusion across multiple participants. Nobody got the distinction between MPOC and MPOC for Quotes. The fix was progressive labelling: first instance showed the full term with the abbreviation in brackets, subsequent uses showed MPOC with an info tooltip on hover. Operators learned the term once and the shorthand worked from there. Fleet size terminology needed similar work – operators weren't sure whether 'coach' and 'bus' referred to the same vehicle type. Labels were clarified with plain descriptions. Both changes confirmed in testing before anything shipped.