Good
A sound concept, half-drawn. Completed and pitch-ready in days.
One direction, only half a deck.
The concept was sound and already had buy-in from the people who mattered. The direction wasn’t the risk — the deliverable was. A pitch to the broader org was coming, and you can’t pitch a concept with holes in it.
A stakeholder flipping through a deck forgives rough fidelity. The eye goes straight to a missing page — and a half-built artifact would undersell a finished idea.
Completeness was the persuasion strategy.
A stakeholder will forgive rough fidelity. They will not forgive a missing page — it snags the eye and derails the room. So the assignment was precise: make an already-good idea complete enough to be believed.
A redesign of the redesign
Not a place to inject my own opinions or reopen settled debates. The direction had already earned its buy-in.
A faithful, fast extension
Be a fast, invisible pair of hands on someone else’s vision — and remove the one risk that could sink a good pitch.
Know what’s signed off before you touch it.
The most important thing to learn first wasn’t visual — it was status. What’s done, what’s open, and what’s already locked. The lead handed me a concrete list of the screens still needed. That list was the whole map.
Homepage
The anchor screen the whole pitch lands on.
Navigation states
The expanded mega-menu and secondary-nav variants.
Interior templates
The workhorse content pages a prospect reads.
Feature & gated flow
The tabbed module, plus gated download and thank-you.
Everything not on the list was locked. Don’t touch. The list marked the boundary of my job — and, by omission, told me what was already settled.
Two rules kept the work coherent.
Match the existing wireframes
Same grid, left-nav pattern, header, content-block rhythm and placeholder conventions. Someone reviewing the deck shouldn’t be able to tell which screens I drew. Consistency was the product.
Enhance only where invited
Where a gap needed a pattern that didn’t exist yet, solve it inside the established visual language — never import a new one. The whole set had to read as if one hand had done it.
The goal was a wireframe set with no visible seams.
Read the skeleton, then extend it faithfully.
With the direction only half-drawn, the first real task was to read the existing screens closely enough to internalize their system, then extend it. Once I could see the skeleton, completing the set was applying it faithfully rather than inventing per screen.
Global header
Search plus primary nav across Products, Solutions, Support, Partners.
Left rail
High-intent quick links: free trial, demos, contact a rep.
Content column
Recurring modules — hero banners and promo cards with CTA space.
Good News band
The recurring footer module at the foot of key pages.
Expanded nav, built on the real product taxonomy.
The clearest artifact for the information-architecture story: the expanded navigation states — a full mega-menu dropdown plus a horizontal secondary-nav variant.
Organized around Good’s real taxonomy — Good Dynamics, Good for Enterprise, Government, OEMs/Carriers, and the Good Mobile lineup — with a persistent Explore Good utility block for trial, collateral, demos, and reps.
The workhorse pages — one language, three variants.
Headline-plus-body layouts with the left quick-link rail, sub-headline sections and inline CTAs — the pages a prospect actually reads once they’ve navigated into a product area.
From product story to conversion, end to end.
Two pieces complete the prospect journey: a tabbed feature module for pages that need to break a product story into scannable parts, and the gated content flow that carries the arc from story to conversion to follow-up.
So I made it a math problem.
The real challenge wasn’t ambiguity — the direction was clear — it was the clock. A fixed, small number of contracted days against a fixed number of screens. Not a sophisticated technique — just the one that works when the variable you can’t move is time.
Don’t leave until today’s share is done — and there’s no backlog waiting on the final afternoon.
Check the direction before you bet the pitch on it.
The whole engagement rested on an assumption — that the broader team would sign off — and I couldn’t guarantee it; the pitch hadn’t happened yet. What I could do was lower the odds of an unpleasant surprise.
Favorable reactions
WIP reviews with a few teammates came back positive as the work came together.
No drift
The completed direction wasn’t drifting from what the team expected.
Confidence to push
Enough signal to keep pushing toward the pitch, not second-guess it.
The full set, on time, seamless.
The complete set the lead had scoped — matched closely enough to read as one continuous piece of work, delivered on the compressed timeline.
The candid part: because this was a brief pre-pitch assist, no KPIs were defined for my portion, and I wasn’t on the project long enough to see how the pitch itself landed. Being upfront about that is part of doing the work responsibly.
Sometimes the highest-leverage move is making a good idea complete enough to be believed.
Scope ruthlessly
Know what’s done, open, and signed off before touching anything.
Respect the system
Extend the language that’s there — don’t impose your own.
Math the deadline
Turn a scary finish-everything into a daily share you can hit.
Finish to persuade
Completeness is what lets a good idea be believed in a pitch.