Challenge

As B2B SaaS products scale, administration becomes exponentially more complex. Platform teams must manage hundreds or thousands of tenants, each with different plans, feature access, billing states, and security requirements - while tenant admins need clarity and control without exposure to platform-level complexity.

The challenge was to design a multi-tenant admin system that:
• Enables platform administrators to efficiently manage tenants, features, billing, and system health at scale
• Provides tenant administrators with intuitive user, role, and permission management
• Balances power and safety, preventing accidental misconfiguration
• Scales gracefully as tenants, features, and permissions grow

Design Goals

1. Separation of concerns: Platform admins and tenant admins have different mental models, responsibilities, and risk profiles.
2. High signal, low noise: Admin tools are information-dense by necessity—but must still be scannable, predictable, and safe.
3. Operational efficiency at scale: Actions must support bulk operations, overrides, and auditing without sacrificing clarity.
4. Enterprise-grade trust: Clear status indicators, auditability, and permission transparency are essential for B2B credibility.

Users & Mental Models

Platform Admin

• Internal operations, support, finance, security teams
• Think in systems, tenants, and risk
• Prioritize uptime, revenue, compliance, and scale



Tenant Admin

• Customer-side IT, Ops, or Team Leads
• Think in people, access, and productivity
• Want control without cognitive overload

Personas

Information Architecture Strategy

Platform Admin Tool

Research Goals

1. Understand how platform admins mentally model tenants, features, and risk
2. Identify where existing admin tools fail under scale
3. Validate how tenant admins expect to manage users and permissions

Research Methods Used

Stakeholder & Subject-Matter Interviews
• Platform operations
• Customer support
• Finance / billing stakeholders
• Security / compliance

Key Insights:
• Admins think in exceptions, not happy paths
• Overrides are common but poorly tracked in most systems
• Audit logs are often used reactively, not proactively

Workflow Mapping
• Investigating a billing issue
• Enabling a beta feature for select tenants
• Responding to a system alert

This surfaced friction points around:
• Context switching
• Poor system state visibility
• Repetitive manual actions

Dashboard

Manage Tenants

Tenant Details

Overview



• Plan Details and Useage
• High-risk actions - Reset Password, Impersonate Tenant, Suspend Tenant
• Add Tenant

Destructive or sensitive actions are visible but intentionally friction-aware to prevent misuse.

---

Subscriptions and Billing



• Date Range Filtering
• Payment Status Indicators
• Invoice Download and Print

Finance and support teams often need self-serve access to billing history without jumping tools.

---

Feature Flags



• Plan-based, Beta, Security
• ON/OFF toggles
• Locked state
• Clear override indicators

Feature availability must be understandable across plan defaults, tenant overrides, and betas without ambiguity.

---

Platform Management

Feature Management



• Global default state
• Number of active tenants
• Number of overrides

Supports drill-in for deep control.

---

Feature Drill-In (modal)

• List all tenant overrides
• Bulk selection to remove overrides

Modal keeps admins in context while performing potentially high-impact actions, reducing navigation errors.

---

Platform Admin Success Metrics

Because admin tools are internal, operational, and high-risk, success is measured less by engagement and more by efficiency, accuracy, and confidence.

Operational Efficiency

• Time to locate a tenant: Baseline to Target: 45s - 15s. Validates global search, tenant list scannability
• Time to resolve a tenant issue: Measures effectiveness of dashboard alerts, tenant drill-in, and feature flag visibility
• Bulk action usage rate: Indicates whether feature override and bulk management tooling is reducing manual work

Error & Risk Reduction

• Incidents caused by misconfiguration: Tracks whether locked features, clear override states, and audit logs reduce mistakes
• Rollback time for feature overrides: Measures speed of recovery when issues occur

Business Impact

• Billing-related support tickets: Expect reduction due to clearer subscription and invoice visibility
• Tenant churn linked to misconfiguration or downtime: Downstream indicator of platform stability and admin effectiveness

Tenant Admin Tool

Accessed directly within the product via an Admin button, reinforcing that this is a contextual extension, not a separate system.

Users

• Email
• Role (selectable)
• Status
• Last Log In

Focus on reducing friction for high-frequency tasks like onboarding, offboarding, and role changes. Inline editing and auto-save supports fast updates and eliminates risk of lost work.

---

Roles and Permissions

Matrix View
• Users x Permissions
• Checkbox assignment
• Add New Permissions

This format mirrors how admins think about access control relationships, not isolated settings pages.

---

Settings

Tenant-specific configuration without exposure to platform-level concepts.

---

Key UX Challenges & Solutions

Preventing Misconfiguration

• Locked features
• Clear override indicators
• Grouped destructive actions
• Audit logs

Scaling Without Redesign

• Modular IA
Feature-based governance
• Bulk actions
• Consistent patterns across surfaces

Balancing Power & Usability

• Progressive disclosure
• Contextual controls
• Separation of admin responsibilities