Product Design Intern
ROLE
Product Design Manager
Product Design Buddies
Product Managers
UX Researchers
Engineers
TEAM
July 2025 - September 2025
12 Weeks
TIMELINE
ORGS
Smart Infrastructure – Brightly Software (BSW)
Product Management > Product Design > Asset Management Pod
BACKGROUND
Brightly's SaaS products allow enterprise clients—spanning manufacturing, education, healthcare, and government—to manage a combined portfolio of over $200 billion in physical asset values. Currently, they are building a next-generation, mobile-first CMMS tailored for small to mid-market manufacturers and education organizations. The goal is to modernize maintenance operations with a cloud-native workflow that enables faster onboarding and higher product engagement.
Problem Space
Legacy CMMS tools were too complex and costly for smaller organizations resulting in decreased usage, increased churn, and limited visibility into maintenance operations. Small breweries and similar manufacturers rely heavily on spreadsheets and manual processes, leading to downtime, maintenance errors, and lost revenue.
Solution
I joined the team to define and prototype foundational maintenance workflows focusing on asset creation, work order scheduling, and mobile usability. I collaborated closely with PMs, design leadership, and development to ensure the experience aligned with product goals and reduced operational friction for maintenance teams.
While the specifics of my internship are under a NDA, here are my key contributions and impact:
Owned the UX design for core asset and work order workflows, delivering engineering-ready prototypes that reduced interaction steps by over 30%, directly supporting the target of enabling users to complete their first work order in under 15 minutes and accelerating onboarding for small manufacturers.
Proposed OCR-integrated asset onboarding, enabling automated extraction of equipment data from labels and documentation to minimize manual input, improve data integrity, and significantly reduce the operational effort required to transition from spreadsheets into a centralized CMMS.
Drove the transition of core product experiences to the new Siemens iX Industrial Experience Design System, translating over 100 legacy components and interaction patterns from a legacy design system to ensure a cohesive and modern user experience during a company-wide migration.
Redesigned preventive maintenance scheduling as a scalable system model, replacing ad-hoc spreadsheet tracking with standardized tasks and dynamic work order generation, strengthening uptime visibility and supporting business goals to reduce maintenance backlog by 25% and increase asset reliability.
IMPACT
<5
day onboarding for customers
80% +
users able to complete their first work order in under 15 minutes
20%
reduction in maintenance backlog within the first 6 months
40%
mobile adoption within 3 months of deployment
My contributions focused specifically on the asset and work order scheduling foundations that made these outcomes possible, ensuring the system captured the right level of data to support usability today and scalability tomorrow.
Molly took full responsibility for a major redesign effort across several of our core product features, including Create, Edit, Filter workflows and List views, for Assets, Work Orders, and Inventory. This was a complex and high-visibility project, and she approached it with remarkable speed, creativity, and ownership (important to me as UX designer). She iterated and produced over 100+ high-fidelity comps per feature to demonstrate user workflows. She presented the workflow mocks to senior-level stakeholders across Product, Technology, Design, and Marketing, communicating design decisions with clarity and confidence.
As a designer, Molly stood out because of her exceptional engagement and responsiveness. She thoughtfully incorporated feedback, often turning around updates quickly and efficiently, and consistently upheld a collaborative, positive working style. She is genuinely easy to work with, and her professionalism elevated every interaction.
Her impact was so significant that we extended her contract for an additional month to cover responsibilities for a senior product designer. This is not something we do often, and it is a testament to the trust and respect she earned within our team.
— Erich Shreck, Senior Product Designer @ Brightly Software, a Siemens Company
Reflections & Takeaways
Design for Growth, Not Just the MVP
Although much of my work focused on MVP workflows, I learned to design with the product’s future intelligence in mind. Decisions around asset structure, data capture, and workflow relationships were made to not only support immediate usability, but also future reporting and preventative maintenance capabilities. This strengthened my ability to balance short-term delivery with long-term scalability.
Systems Thinking Over Screen Thinking
Rather than designing isolated interfaces, I had to think about how assets, work orders, inventory, and reporting would all connect over time. This shifted my mindset from “what does this page need?” to “how does this data structure support the entire product ecosystem?” This mindset deepened my understanding of how early UX decisions can shape the product's long-term product intelligence.
Collaboration Sharpens Judgment
Working closely with product managers, engineers, and manufacturing subject-matter experts taught me how to balance usability with technical and operational realities. I became more confident facilitating tradeoff discussions, presenting my design decisions to different groups, asking better questions about edge cases, and grounding my design choices in both user needs and system constraints.
Working on this project at Siemens was my first experience designing within the complexity of enterprise software at global scale. I learned how much care it takes to simplify systems that carry real operational and financial weight for the people using them every day. Contributing to a product aimed at making maintenance work more accessible for smaller teams made the work feel especially meaningful to me. I left the experience with a deeper appreciation for cross-functional collaboration, long-term product thinking, and the responsibility that comes with shaping tools that influence real-world operations. This project solidified my interest in designing systems that balance usability, scalability, and tangible impact.