A Unified Platform for Pipeline Field Operations.
Our client is an energy infrastructure company that operates a large pipeline network and the field operations that maintain it. Its operations and field teams rely on an internal platform to manage and inspect pipeline assets every day, and that platform had reached the limits of its legacy foundation. Goji Labs ran a 4-week product strategy sprint across every stakeholder group, audited the existing application, and translated the findings into a prioritized roadmap and a technical path to mobile that leadership and IT could decide from.
The Challenge
The platform had become central to daily operations, but it ran on an aging internal stack that sat outside the technology standards the company’s IT organization had since adopted. The business wanted to expand the product and bring it to mobile so field crews could use it where the work happens. Building further on that foundation required IT approval, and IT could not approve a direction nobody had defined.
The product touched a wide set of people: field crews, office teams, and the outside vendors who work alongside them. No single group could speak for the whole. Operations, field leadership, IT, and business stakeholders each held valid, well-informed views about what mattered most, and those views did not point the same way.
The result was a long list of problems worth solving and no shared way to decide which came first. Without dedicated UI/UX resources in house, there was also no one positioned to turn competing needs into a product direction the group could see and react to. The company needed a way to bring every voice into one conversation, understand the tradeoffs, and put a decision in front of IT and leadership they could stand behind.
Our Approach
Discovery began with the business, not the interface. Our team spent time with each stakeholder group to understand how pipeline maintenance is planned and carried out, who in the field depends on the tool and when, and how information moves between operations, IT, and outside vendors. We worked with IT to map its roadmap and the standards any future solution would have to respect. That grounding let us weigh every idea that followed against what mattered to the end user, and it earned us the room to guide the conversation rather than record it.
Through a series of facilitated workshops in a 4-week product strategy sprint, we gave the stakeholder groups a shared structure for a conversation they had been having in fragments. We mapped current-state journeys for the roles that touch the platform, surfaced the full set of problem statements, and led the group through scoring them by user value and business impact. Disagreements became specific and visible, which is what made them resolvable.
We audited the existing application in parallel, documenting where it serves users well, where it creates friction, and which fixes could ship in the near term regardless of the longer modernization path.
From there we turned the agreed direction into artifacts leadership could decide from. We built journey maps and process flows, wireframes of the core experiences, and concept designs of the key screens, and we defined the role a mobile app would play for field teams so decision-makers could react to a concrete vision instead of a feature list. The mobile concept was built for how the work happens in the field: offline capture of forms, notes, and photos, simplified maps, and one-handed use for gloved, outdoor conditions, with sync once a connection returns.
Our recommendation paired that product direction with a technical path: a phased migration of the existing backend onto the company’s approved stack using a strangler pattern, a PWA approach to cover offline storage, camera, and location needs on mobile, and the specifics IT would need to see to approve continuing. We added a rollout plan for internal teams and the external vendors who work within the platform, and pulled everything into a single decision-ready readout.
The Impact
The strategy sprint produced a shared plan that replaced a stalled internal debate and gave leadership and IT a direction they could act on. Operations, field leadership, IT, and business stakeholders landed on a single prioritized feature set, scored by user value and business impact and sequenced across Now, Next, and Later. That direction came paired with a technical path from the existing backend to mobile: a phased migration onto the company’s approved stack using a strangler pattern, a PWA approach for offline field capture, and the specifics IT needed to approve continuing. A UX audit of the existing application separated what serves users well from the friction and surfaced a set of near-term fixes the team can make before the larger rebuild, while journey maps, wireframes, and concept designs of the key screens gave decision-makers something concrete to react to, including a defined role for a mobile app supporting field crews working offline in gloved, outdoor conditions.
It all came together in a decision-ready readout that settled the debate holding up the platform, giving leadership a direction it could fund and a rollout plan covering both internal teams and the external vendors who work inside it.
- A single prioritized feature set sequenced across Now, Next, and Later
- A phased technical path to mobile on IT’s approved stack
- Journey maps, wireframes, and concept designs of the key screens
- A rollout plan for internal teams and outside vendors
