Built the brand and the product digitising Europe's elevator-maintenance industry
Duration
12 Weeks
Role
Sole Designer - Brand & Product
Industry
B2B SaaS · Field Service · DACH
Seed stage. Sole designer. Ten weeks. I built Mainteny's brand and product MVP from nothing - credible enough for an investor pitch, simple enough for a technician standing in a lift shaft.
Scope of Work
Brand Identity
Product Design
Design System
Mobile App
Overview
Digitising an industry that ran on paper
Elevator and escalator maintenance companies across Europe had resisted digitisation for decades. Mainteny - backed by Germany's EXIST grant - set out to move scheduling, dispatch, work reports, and invoicing into one system.
CEO Tom Chenna had seen the inefficiency firsthand inside a global lift company. I joined as sole designer to turn that conviction into a brand and a working product.
The Challenge
Two problems, solved at once
Every visit, inspection, and repair must be legally documented - yet most SME maintenance companies did it all on paper. Lost job sheets meant client disputes. Missed service cycles meant liability. Technicians spent only 20–30% of their day on actual maintenance.
Build for a technician in a lift shaft. Build for an investor in a pitch room. Both, at once, in ten weeks.
What I Owned
Brand, product, and system - in parallel
Brand identity
Logo, colour, type, and tone - built to hold up in a pitch deck, the product UI, and on a business card.
Product design
Web dashboard for dispatchers. Mobile app for field technicians. Two very different contexts, one design language.
Design system & handoff
Component library and design tokens built for a single developer - extensible enough to grow into, not rebuild six months later.
Research
No users yet - so I grounded the work elsewhere
No users yet - Mainteny was pre-launch. I grounded the work in founder domain knowledge and a competitive analysis of European field-service software. Three things stood out.
A dated, dense category
Existing tools inherited patterns from decade-old desktop enterprise software. Something genuinely clean would stand out without losing function.
Mobile was an afterthought
Every competitor had responsive web. None was genuinely mobile-first. For a technician on site, the phone had to be a first-class surface.
In DACH, credibility sells
Regulated SME buyers decide cautiously. A product that looks like a prototype loses the deal before the demo ends. Brand at MVP stage is a sales decision.
Principles
Four rules that shaped every decision
01
The brand is a product decision
In a regulated B2B market, how a product looks tells buyers whether it can be trusted with critical operations.
02
Design for the technician between jobs
Large tap targets, fast task completion, offline-first. Built for dirty hands and time pressure.
03
One system, two contexts
Office dashboard and field app. Different workflows, one product. A shared system from day one was the only way.
04
Scope is a design skill
Ten weeks, one designer. The work had to be complete and credible - not comprehensive. Knowing what to leave for later mattered as much as the design itself.
The Judgment Call
An MVP brand is not a temporary brand. It shipped to real customers, real investors, and real press - so it had to be right the first time.
I treated founder domain knowledge as primary research - more specific than anything I could have gathered in ten weeks. And I treated the brand as production work, not a placeholder. That's why the foundation held.
Impact
What shipped, and what it became
01
Built from a blank canvas in 10 weeks
Complete brand system and investor-ready product design, delivered on time from nothing.
02
Two surfaces, one system
Web dashboard for office teams. Native mobile app for field technicians. One design language across both.
03
Used in the seed raise
The brand and product carried the founders' seed-round pitch - built to hold up under investor and enterprise-client scrutiny from day one.
04
Live at scale
The design system extended into production. Today: 100,000+ managed assets, 18,000+ jobs a month, customers across 9 countries.
Field Technician Mobile App Prototype
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Where I've shiped
