Vicoland connects enterprise clients with “Vicos” — remote, ready-to-run freelance teams.
When I joined, no Vico Lead could successfully create a usable team profile without extensive hand-holding from internal staff.
This created a major bottleneck just as the company was seeing increased inbound demand from SAP clients.
My redesign introduced a guided, motivating, and AI-supported onboarding flow that enabled Vico Leads to independently create complete profiles — for the first time.
Vicoland was onboarding more SAP enterprise clients but couldn’t deliver high-quality teams quickly enough.
Internal teams spent disproportionate time manually building Vico profiles, while Vico Leads missed out on opportunities simply because they didn’t understand how to present their teams.
Enable Vico Leads to autonomously create high-quality team profiles so that they can win big SAP projects and start working ASAP on them.
My role: Product Designer
Our team: 1 PM, 2 dev squads (each with FE, BE, QA), 1 additional designer on a parallel product area
Collaboration: Close daily alignment with PM + both dev squads; weekly syncs with stakeholders and cross-team design alignment.
As the Product designer for this project I was in charge of:
End to end research, problem definition, re-design and implementation scope in collaboration with my PM and the engeneering team
| From 0% to consistent autonomous setup:
For the first time, Vico Leads were successfully completing profiles on their own (10+ within the first months) | ~60% of proactive Leads reached “client-ready” quality with only light review. | Internal time spent on manual profile creation dropped meaningfully (≈30%). | Client matching accelerated Suitable Vicos could often be selected within a few days of a new request. | | --- | --- | --- | --- |
<aside> 🤦🏻♂️ **Users’ struggles
New Vico Leads could not independently set up a Vico profile.
The experience was:
⁉️ What a Vico even was
⁉️ Why a Vico profile mattered
⁉️ Whether to fill in their personal profile or the Vico profile
⁉️ Whether they should add members first or edit the Vico first
⁉️ How to collect the CVs of their teammates
⁉️ How would this profile help them win projects
“I don’t want to do this.”
“I can’t do it.”
“I don’t know how to do it.”
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<aside> 📉 Business impact **
<aside> **Empower Vico Leads by providing them with clear guidance via:
➡️ onboarding segmentation (”Lead a team” vs “Join as team member”) ➡️ 4-steps “Set up your Vico” wizard ➡️ in-profile guidances (empty states) ➡️ profile completeness checklist and better value communication**
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I conducted a compressed but thorough mixed-method research phase:
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🧑🏼💻 Stakeholder interviews
To understand internal processes, definitions of “OK Vicos” and business pressures.
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💭 Insights
📝 High Operational Effort in Preparing Vicos and Distracting From Higher-Value Tasks
Our internal team needed to present 2–3 Vicos suitable for the project requests they received within 3 days. Instead of concentrating on identifying and pitching the best teams for client needs, the team’s time was diverted to operational preparation work.
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🍿 Hotjar recordings & drop-off points
Identified specific screens where users froze or bailed.
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🐎 Competitors analysis
Benchmarked onboarding patterns from: A•Team, Malt, Freelancer.com, Fiverr Pro & Freelancer Map
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