We had a pretty lengthy discovery process which consisted of several days of meetings and working sessions. In trying to get a deeper understanding of the complex problems they were facing, we focused first on the stakeholder and user frustrations. I also conducted a small product audit to see if there were any other areas of opportunity that we could address while architecting a solution. It was also key to keep in mind the future goal of the client to turn this product to a SaaS for future monetization. We started by focusing on two major user groups: the admins (client) who would run the entire show and the base users who would register animals to be shown. For the admins, it was important to be able to somewhat automate registration and keep track of scoring, divisions, and payouts. The base user needed to be able to sign up for competitions, register animals, manage their animals, and create/manage a group of users/animals if they were representing a family, club, or organization. The edge cases really challenged the design because a group could have as little as a few animals or as many as 50+ so scalability was crucial. We also thoughtfully considered the patterns that both user groups were used to as to not create a totally jarring experience when switching to the new product. Individual animals had many specific data points associated with them and could change based on the species of the animal (due to the breed’s association guidelines) or rules of the competition. This added a tremendous amount of complexity for both design and development and led to multiple working sessions (both internal and external) to make sure we were in alignment to minimize risk throughout the project.