Poseidon
Poseidon — Maritime Agency Management Platform Poseidon is a multi-tenant maritime agency platform designed to centralize vessel operations, documentation, and disbursement workflows in a single digital ecosystem. Built to support multiple shipping agencies, the system combines private operational workspaces with shared global maritime data, such as vessels, ports, port line-ups, and service provider directories.
ERP
Cargill
2024
Poseidon is a global maritime operations platform designed to centralize and simplify the complex workflows involved in managing vessel port calls.
The platform connects multiple stakeholders across the maritime ecosystem — including shipping agencies, operations teams, documentation teams, disbursement analysts, vessel representatives, port service providers, and clients — bringing critical information and workflows into a single environment.
The product was structured around three core areas: Operation, Documentation, and Disbursement, supporting agencies throughout the lifecycle of a voyage with greater visibility, consistency, and operational control.
The challenge
Maritime agency workflows were highly fragmented. Operational updates, documentation, financial processes, and communication were distributed across disconnected systems, spreadsheets, emails, and manual processes.
This fragmentation created low visibility across operations, duplicated work, higher operational risk, financial inefficiencies, and inconsistent experiences for agencies, vessels, and clients.
Poseidon was created to address this complexity by transforming fragmented processes into connected, traceable, and scalable digital workflows.
My role
I joined the project as Lead Product Designer, responsible for shaping the product experience from discovery through delivery.
I worked closely with Product, Engineering, Operations, Maritime Business Representatives, and other domain stakeholders to understand the operational ecosystem, identify opportunities, prioritize problems, and translate complex maritime processes into scalable product solutions.
My responsibilities included:
Leading product discovery and UX strategy across key workflows
Facilitating workshops and collaborative refinement sessions
Structuring complex operational requirements and product backlogs
Mapping users, stakeholders, ecosystems, and end-to-end workflows
Defining information architecture and interaction models
Designing and validating core product experiences
Establishing patterns and reusable solutions for a scalable platform
Supporting Product and Engineering throughout implementation
Mentoring 2 Product Designers and supporting 2 Product Managers throughout the project
The work covered multiple countries and operational contexts, requiring the product to balance global consistency with the complexity and specific needs of maritime agencies.
The following artifacts show how I approached the problem, from understanding the business and its constraints to identifying opportunities, prioritizing initiatives, and defining the product architecture.
Crafting the Platform Experience
After extensive research into maritime agency operations, stakeholder responsibilities, operational bottlenecks, and the complexity of port workflows, we translated the findings into a structured digital platform designed around five core pillars.
The first pillar focused on the agency structure, including agency data, internal users, permissions, teams, and collaborators. The second pillar organized the broader ecosystem of intermediaries and clients, ensuring that service providers, vessel stakeholders, and client-side users could interact with the platform through clearer roles and information flows.
The third pillar was designed for operations professionals, supporting daily workflows such as vessel appointments, State of Facts, line-up management, production reports, operational updates, and port activity tracking.
The fourth pillar focused on documentation, centralizing vessel documents, cargo files, certificates, attachments, compliance materials, and supporting evidence across the voyage lifecycle.
The fifth pillar focused on disbursement, covering Proforma DA, Final DA, cost estimation, cost comparison, prefunding, approvals, financial attachments, and greater visibility into the operational costs of each voyage.
This structure allowed Poseidon to evolve from a collection of fragmented maritime workflows into a scalable platform experience, connecting agencies, vessels, service providers, and clients through a more consistent, transparent, and operationally efficient system.
Success Metrics
To measure the success of Poseidon, I structured the product metrics around the main value drivers of the platform: operational efficiency, documentation accuracy, disbursement control, user adoption, and stakeholder visibility.
The primary success metric was the number of voyages successfully managed end-to-end in Poseidon, from appointment creation and operational updates to documentation management and Final DA closure. This metric helped evaluate whether the platform was becoming the central workspace for maritime agency operations.
Operational efficiency was measured through indicators such as time to complete the State of Facts, number of overdue tasks per voyage, time to generate production reports, and reduction in manual status updates. Documentation success was tracked by measuring document completion rate per voyage, time to find documents, missing document rates, and document-related errors.
For disbursement workflows, key metrics included time to create a Proforma DA, time to close a Final DA, variance between estimated and final costs, number of cost discrepancies, and approval time. These indicators were essential to evaluate financial accuracy, transparency, and process efficiency.
Because Poseidon was designed as a multi-tenant SaaS platform, adoption metrics were also critical. Active agencies, active users per agency, feature adoption by module, voyages created, Proformas generated, and Final DAs closed helped measure whether the platform was scaling across different teams and operational contexts.
Together, these metrics created a clear framework to evaluate Poseidon not only as an interface, but as a platform capable of reducing manual work, improving operational consistency, increasing financial control, and strengthening visibility across the maritime service ecosystem.
