Publisher
A communication tool for hospitality teams, built in 100 days
Problem. Hospitality teams ran internal communication through WhatsApp and email. Messages got buried, and no one could tell who had read them.
What I did. I led the design of a 100-day MVP — a tool for managers to publish an update and send it only to the right team, location, or role.
Outcome. We shipped on time, and validated the core idea with real admins. When the build drifted, I spent a week in Valencia with the developers to bring it back.
Challenges
One place for communication. Updates scattered across chats and inboxes, pulled into one place managers would actually open.
Simple enough for busy managers. They run restaurants and hotels. They're not at a desk.
Two connected products. Managers wrote from a desktop tool. Employees read it inside the Favur® app. Every feature had to work as both.
Four languages. German, French, Italian, English — without extra work for the manager.
01 —
DEFINING THE THING
Building a shared idea out of nothing
We had 100 days and no one could say what the tool actually was. Developers were talking infrastructure, the business had set the deadline, the founders kept saying "a communication tool" without defining it — and design had nothing concrete to start from.
So I stopped guessing and got everyone in a room: a session where we built it on a board, drawing, asking, erasing, until a direction showed up.
The board where the idea started to take shape — sketched, erased, and redrawn until a direction existed.
The first session — pulling the idea out of everyone's heads and onto the wall until a direction existed.
02 —
Making it real
Turning sketches into something buildable
No settled direction, not much time. I designed the UI and built the design system in parallel, so developers had a foundation while the product was still taking shape.
Publisher screens look and feel
The component library, built in parallel with the screens.
Reusing what already existed.
Publisher plugged into Favur® directly. Employees signed in with their existing credentials, and their team structure came with them — so an admin could message one team without setting anything up. Getting that connection secure and simple took several rounds on the login alone.
Publisher Interface. Side panel allows choosing Audience — reusing the team structure already in Favur®.
03 —
Valencia
A week with the dev team
The build stalled. Fifteen developers, and what they were building had moved away from the design. Calls weren't fixing it, so I flew out to sort it out.
The team, on the way to Valencia
I went to watch how they actually built.
Where the real bottlenecks were, how they used Material UI, what was eating hours for no reason. A button animation that took too long could wait until after the MVP.
Running one of the alignment sessions.
Most of the week was about trust.
Getting them to tell me when something was going to be hard, instead of building it wrong in silence. We worked through four structured sessions across the week. After that, the design-dev relationship was a different thing.
workshop timeline: 4 workshops, participants, documentation
04 —
Ship & validate
Shipping it, and meeting the people who'd use it
I worked through the features the business kept adding and supported the developers to a testable MVP. We tested it with real admins — rough edges from the dev side, but it held up enough to validate the work.
Testing the MVP with a hospitality admin.
Credits & Technical Scope
Client
Favur® GmbH
Design Lead
Sebastian Gallego Niebles
Business Leads
Phillip Lehmann
CTO
Jordan Jarolim
Design Support
Severine Graf
Platform
Web Application & Native App (iOS & Android)
Tools & Methods
Design Thinking, SPRINT Collaboration, Workshops, Usability Testing, User Flows
Softwares
Figma, FigJam, UserTesting, Hotjar, ChatGPT, AI transcript.