Sawmills.ai · Founding product design
Designing an Observability Platform from 0→1
Turning an engineering-built observability control plane into a coherent product customers could configure, understand, and operate.
A control-plane experience for managing telemetry on the desktop, paired with qualified insights delivered to owners.
The problem
Telemetry was growing faster than teams could govern it.
DevOps teams needed control over telemetry cost, cardinality, and compliance without slowing delivery—but the product made those risks hard to see.
- Reduce spend without losing signal
- Control cardinality and compliance risk
- Debug pipeline behavior quickly
Before state - Sawmills, July 2024
Early concepts covered the right jobs, but the product model and interaction patterns had not yet converged.
Finding the product
Defining the Minimum Lovable Product.
Six-plus interviews with platform and observability engineers surfaced three jobs: reduce spend, keep the signal, and debug faster. With a tight runway and limited access to design partners, I scoped the smallest coherent loop that could prove value in weeks—not quarters.
This MLP became the organizing model for navigation, workflows, and launch scope.
The launch experience
Three journeys defined the product.
Connect and route. Understand and improve. Operate safely.
01
Connect and route
The pipeline became the product’s mental model: sources, shared processing, and destination-specific processing.
02
Understand and improve
Insights showed where volume and cost accumulated. Processors turned those findings into action.
03
Operate safely
A saved configuration was not always live. The UI showed desired state, deployment progress, failure impact, and actual telemetry.
Founding-designer operating model
Building the foundation while shipping.
Three months in, with one front-end engineer and no dedicated PM beyond the CPO, I migrated the product screen by screen—keeping backend APIs intact while the system kept shipping.
- Migrate screen by screen; keep backend APIs unchanged
- Use Ant Design as a foundation, then restyle type, spacing, and icons
- Codify reusable layouts, interactions, and system states
- Add keyboard navigation throughout
A shared shell and interaction language made pipelines, insights, and processors feel like one product.
Outcomes
A coherent product shipped—and customers could use it.
PUBLIC LAUNCH
Feb 19, 20250→1 product launchADOPTION
First customersOnboarded after launchTIME TO VALUE
≈ 5 minutesFirst pipeline · design partners, n=5We’ve gone from chasing engineers to managing telemetry like a product.
What came next
One intelligence layer, multiple surfaces.
The control-plane foundation later allowed Sawmills to extend beyond the core application into agent-driven workflows across the product, Slack, and GitHub. Rather than designing each surface as a separate experience, I treated them as different expressions of the same contextual system.
Explore the Agent Command Center case study →