“Build us a LinkedIn.” What we shipped instead and why it was the right call.

The brief, as it arrived

Stakeholder Request: “We want a social media platform — a LinkedIn for our SiGREEN.” - Product stakeholder, kickoff

The brief looked great on paper. It wasn't actually possible.

The stakeholder said: “Build LinkedIn for suppliers.” But LinkedIn works because it's public everyone's profile is visible, everyone can browse, everyone's searchable. For manufacturers buying parts, that doesn't work. Your supplier list is secret. Your cost data is confidential. Publishing it would hurt your business.

So if we built what they asked for, we'd ship something nobody could use without breaking their contracts. I figured out what they actually needed. They said “LinkedIn.” What they meant was: “Help our companies find each other and connect.” Those are different problems. I went and talked to the people who'd use it — buyers, operators, legal teams. I found out they wanted to find partners, but only if they controlled who could see them. So I designed for that instead: a way to search and connect, but with permission. You decide who sees your data. I also drew a line: I owned the permission system and what it looks like on screen. I didn't own the technical pieces that make it work (the backend system). But I was crystal clear about what I needed from them to make my design land.

Why this matters: The real work wasn't building a feature the stakeholder asked for. It was understanding what they actually needed, and redesigning the whole thing around that.

The problem underneath the vision

SiGREEN's core loop is a customer requesting a product carbon footprint from a supplier. That loop assumes you can reach the supplier. In practice:

Two companies could both be active on the platform, in the same supply chain, and still have to onboard each other from scratch over email.

There was no reliable way to answer “is this company already here, and is it the same legal entity I contract with?” Company names collide, subsidiaries share branding, and procurement teams work from tax IDs and DUNS numbers, not brand names. The result was duplicate accounts, invitations sent to companies that were already onboarded, and a request cycle that stalled before any carbon data moved.

Reframed, the vision became three design questions, and they replaced “make it social” as the scope:

Translating the vision into scope

Placeholder. The reference page introduces this section (“I ran the stakeholder's ‘LinkedIn’ mental model through the three questions above, feature by feature. Each one got kept, reshaped, or cut — with the reason on record, so the decision could be revisited later rather than re-argued.”) but its detail is not present in the published page source. Placeholder: add the keep / reshape / cut table here.