Presale demo
A command centre demo that ends in a work order
Operations people do not buy dashboards, they buy what happens after the dashboard. I built the demo so every insight terminates in the maintenance system, in the client's own brand.
- The whole application recoloured to the official brand palette
- One token swapThe whole application recoloured to the official brand palette
- The live map runs on an open basemap by design
- No vendor keyThe live map runs on an open basemap by design
- The demo ends in the maintenance system, not in a chart
- Detection → work orderThe demo ends in the maintenance system, not in a chart
The client
A large industrial estate and smart-city operator in the Middle East, evaluating a technology partner alongside a national telecommunications incumbent. The audience was operations leadership, not marketing.
The engagement
A presale demo built to be re-presented — brand as configuration, so the same build serves the next prospect.
A working demo of this build exists.
It is not public yet — ask for access, and where the NDA allows I will send a link or walk you through it on a call.
The problem
A presale demo for people who run real infrastructure has two ways to die. It looks like a template with someone else's colours on it, so nobody believes it was built for them; or it stops at a beautiful chart, which is exactly the point where an operations audience asks what they are supposed to do with it.
What I did
I made brand a configuration rather than a design pass: the interface is entirely token-driven, so switching to the client's official palette recoloured every screen at once and the same code can be re-presented elsewhere without a rebuild. The narrative was built to end in an operational system — a camera detection becoming a maintenance work order — so the demo answers the operations question rather than the marketing one. The live map deliberately runs on an open basemap with no vendor key, because a demo that stops working when a trial token expires is a liability on the day it matters most.
What was built
A command centre prototype covering energy, water, lighting, environmental metrics and incidents, with a live geospatial layer on an open basemap, computer-vision detections resolving into maintenance work orders, bilingual right-to-left support, and a token-driven design system so brand alignment is a configuration change.
On the table at the end
- Working command-centre prototype
- Brand-aligned token set
- Live geospatial layer with geolocated assets
What it changed
Turned a template-looking capability demo into something the client's own operations people recognised as their system, with the value story ending in a maintenance work order rather than a chart.
How it ran
- 01
Tokenise everything
Colours, surfaces and typography as design tokens, so brand alignment is a config change and a whole-application theme flip is an afternoon.
- 02
Use the real palette
Official brand values sourced rather than approximated by eye — invisible in a screenshot, obvious to the client's marketing team.
- 03
End every thread in an action
Energy, water, lighting and incident views all resolve into a work order, which is what an operations audience actually buys.
- 04
A map without a leash
Interactive geospatial layer on an open basemap, no vendor account and no expiring token anywhere in the demo path.
- 05
Bilingual from the start
Second language with right-to-left layout built in rather than positioned as a later phase.
Other work
All case studies →- Regional banking
One prototype, two markets, no budget in the room
A meeting with no project, no budget and no agenda. I brought a day-in-the-life prototype in the client's own language rather than a capability deck, then shipped their feedback as working features.
- Capital markets
Giving a bilingual site's content back to its editors
Every string on a bilingual market operator's site lived in code, so a comma was a developer ticket. I moved the copy into a headless CMS without letting the market data follow it.
- Consumer IoT
Shipping a wearable app before the wearable existed
A child-safety product whose hardware was not ready. We built the MVP against a mocked device contract instead of waiting, and shipped without the usual collapse when real constraints arrived.
Something similar on your plate?
Thirty minutes, no deck. I will tell you whether it is worth doing at all.