Stepping Into Product Ownership: From Designer to Product Thinker on a University Web Platform
Role: UX Designer / Product Owner
Timeline: 1 year
Quick Overview
🗂 Project: Sites at USC Platform
🎯 Goal: Improve platform sustainability, governance, and support for a university-wide WordPress multisite network.
👩💻 Role
Transitioned from UX design into product ownership responsibilities
Contributed to roadmap planning, vendor coordination, and platform strategy
👥 Users
Faculty and staff managing ~660 distributed university websites with varying levels of technical experience.
🚧 Key Challenges
Fragmented themes and inconsistent governance
Supporting non-technical site owners
Balancing long-term sustainability with evolving stakeholder needs and vendor constraints
✅ The Solution at a Glance
Product roadmap + governance through product thinking. Balancing sustainability, accessibility, and distributed ownership.
Theme deprecation
User onboarding/support
Context: A Fragmented Platform with No Clear Ownership
This case study highlights how I transitioned from UX design into product ownership, leading strategy and prioritization for a university web platform while improving sustainability and governance.
Sites at USC is a university-wide web platform. It’s a WordPress multisite network of ~660 sites, hosted by a third-party vendor (CampusPress) and managed internally. Supporting the platform required balancing vendor constraints with the needs of a diverse set of university stakeholders.
When the product manager left, the platform no longer had a dedicated owner responsible for product direction, prioritization, or long-term platform health. At the same time, the platform faced growing challenges with fragmented themes, inconsistent governance, and support for a broad range of non-technical site owners.
Sites at USC operates on a distributed ownership model:
Faculty and staff request sites from our team
We provision the site (URL, theme, initial setup)
We provide onboarding guidance and documentation
Site owners are responsible for creating and maintaining their own content
This required designing for a wide range of users who:
Had varying levels of technical experience
Used the platform as a secondary responsibility (e.g. professors creating lab sites alongside teaching and research)
Needed guidance to create effective, maintainable sites
Over time, the platform had accumulated:
6 WordPress themes
Inconsistent site quality and structure
Limited governance and platform standards
This created both a gap and an opportunity to step into product ownership.
Stepping Into Product Ownership
Following the PM’s departure, I stepped into a broader role that extended beyond design into product ownership and decision-making.
My responsibilities expanded to include:
Defining and maintaining a product roadmap
Leading vendor communication and coordination
Driving platform maintenance initiatives such as theme deprecation
This shift required moving from:
Designing solutions → deciding what should be built and why
I was now responsible not just for the user experience, but for the long-term sustainability and direction of the platform. I moved from execution to decision-making.
Driving Product Direction Through Key Initiatives
🟦 Platform Sustainability
To improve long-term maintainability, I led efforts to deprecate four outdated and redundant themes used by ~250 sites, reducing fragmentation and accessibility compliance risk across the platform.
Many of the deprecated themes contained known accessibility issues, while the remaining themes had been reviewed and vetted by our accessibility product owner, ensuring a more consistent and compliant baseline experience.
This work required:
Evaluating theme usage across hundreds of sites
Coordinating communication with customers
Making tradeoffs between flexibility and standardization
This initiative helped establish a more sustainable, accessible, and governable platform foundation.
🟦 Supporting Users, Adoption, and Onboarding
Through office hours and direct support, I worked closely with site owners to understand real user challenges.
A key insight was that many users:
Were not technically trained
Used the platform as a secondary responsibility
Struggled with onboarding and site setup despite WordPress being “no-code”
To address this, I collaborated with UX Research to identify gaps and led initiatives such as:
Creating training documentation
Designing guided onboarding support
Running office hours where we held open Q&A sessions and live demos (e.g. building a clean, professional homepage)
Creating a feedback intake workflow to monitor onboarding health and systemic issues
These efforts helped reduce friction and brought the product closer to users’ actual needs.
🟦 Prioritization & Governance
With no dedicated PM, I was responsible for defining and executing the product roadmap.
This involved:
Balancing short-term user needs with long-term platform sustainability
Working within vendor constraints
Identifying key friction areas and prioritizing improvements, particularly in training and onboarding
Rather than focusing on feature output, I focused on making informed tradeoffs that improved the overall system.
Impact and Outcomes
Consolidated six supported themes into two, reducing fragmentation across approximately 250 sites.
Completed an account audit that reduced local accounts by 97% and shared accounts by 88%, strengthening the platform's security and governance.
Hosted recurring office hours that nearly doubled attendance compared to the previous session, creating a consistent feedback channel with site owners.
Developed a product roadmap balancing platform sustainability, accessibility, and user support for future improvements.
Reflection: Becoming a Product Thinker
Stepping into product ownership changed how I fundamentally approach design. Instead of focusing primarily on solutions, I began thinking in terms of systems, tradeoffs, and long-term impact.
I learned to balance competing priorities such as user needs, platform sustainability, vendor constraints, and organizational goals, and learned to make decisions with incomplete information while aligning stakeholders around a shared direction.
Working in a platform with distributed ownership also reinforced the importance of designing beyond the interface. I learned to consider onboarding, governance, and adoption as core parts of the product experience, especially when users are not the most tech savvy.
This experience expanded my role from designing interfaces to shaping product strategy and direction. I now bring both design craft and product thinking together, using design not just to solve problems, but to define what problems are worth solving.