MentorUnion

What started as a platform for one institution needed to work for many.

Mentor Union began as an internal mentorship platform - "Get Prepped" supporting learners at Masters' Union. As the product expanded to serve multiple educational institutions, the existing workflows, permissions, and operational processes were no longer enough.

Administrative tasks relied heavily on developers, teams lacked clear ownership, and day-to-day platform management became increasingly difficult to scale.

The challenge wasn't redesigning a dashboard.It was designing the operational foundation required to support a growing SaaS ecosystem without disrupting existing users.

Product -> https://app.mentorunion.org/login

Understanding the ecosystem before designing the solution.

Before designing interfaces, I focused on understanding how different teams interacted with the platform and where operational bottlenecks existed.

I collaborated with:

• Product Management

• Relationship Managers

• Business Development Teams

• Finance Teams

• Engineering Teams

• QA Teams

Through stakeholder interviews, feedback sessions, analytics reviews, and workflow discussions, I mapped the platform's existing operations and future requirements.

Key Discovery

The primary challenge wasn't learner experience.

It was operational scalability.

Developers were spending significant time handling administrative requests that should have been managed independently by internal teams.

What research revealed.

Across interviews, feedback sessions, Google Analytics, and Microsoft Clarity insights, several recurring patterns emerged.

Designing a governance model for scale.

One of the most important outcomes of this project was defining a scalable administrative structure that could support multiple institutions while maintaining clear ownership and accountability

Why it mattered

This structure reduced operational dependency on engineering while introducing clear accountability across teams.

Translating organizational complexity into product architecture.

Once the governance structure was defined, the next challenge was designing how these roles interacted with the platform.

This involved creating:

• Information Architecture

• User Flows

• Permission Flows

• Navigation Systems

• Role-Based Experiences

Each dashboard experience was tailored around the responsibilities and decision-making authority of that role.

Design Principle

Users should only see what they need to manage.

Not everything the platform can do.

Creating a shared language through a design system.

The platform was originally influenced by Masters' Union's visual language. As Mentor Union evolved into an independent product, consistency became increasingly important.

To support scalability across web, mobile, and administrative products, I established the foundations of a dedicated design system.

System Foundations

• Design Tokens

• Colour & Typography Standards

• Component Library

• Variants & States

• Responsive Guidelines

• Documentation

Why it mattered

A shared system reduced design inconsistencies and created a foundation that could scale with future product growth.

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Designing the administrative experience.

With the system foundations in place, I designed the core administrative interfaces required to support platform operations.

Designed Modules

Authentication & Access

Role-based login experience.

Super Admin Dashboard

Platform governance, subscriptions, organizations, permissions, and system oversight.

Platform Admin Dashboard

Content management, mentor management, analytics, support, and platform operations.

Organization Admin Dashboard

Institution-level management of users, programs, mentors, reports, and settings.

Reflections

Building a product is challenging.Scaling one is harder.

This project taught me that growth isn't always limited by features. Often, the real challenge lies in creating structure around people, permissions, and processes without disrupting the habits users already rely on.

The most complex problems weren't interface problems.They were organizational ones.

Designing for scale meant balancing the needs of users, stakeholders, and teams while creating a system that could evolve alongside the product.