The Google Account for the construction industry

Knauf Digital is the innovation arm of Knauf Group (a 15+B global building materials leader with 43,500+ employees, operating in 90+ countries). The unit focuses on developing B2B digital products for the construction industry.

As PDM, I personally led all discovery and research phases, crunched the numbers, owned the design system and templates, and was directly responsible for the onboarding flow and key feature design. The team owned engineering, and delivery.

The Problem

The ecosystem couldn’t scale because identity wasn’t unified.

Users had to remember multiple passwords, re-enter the same data for every country or app, and had no central place to manage teams, roles, or account information. Business suffered:

• Fragmented CRM made global sales operations nearly impossible
• No single view of customers or companies
• No way to provide personalized pricing or content
• No cross-app retention loops

The Goal

Build a unified access platform that becomes the gateway to the entire Knauf ecosystem — and the foundation for cross-product growth.

The Knauf Account had to:

• Replace all legacy accounts
• Provide frictionless onboarding
• Give teams the ability to manage users and permissions
• Connect to CRM as a single source of truth
• Enable personalized pricing, content, and experience
• Enable personalized pricing, content, and experience

A platform designed not for one product but for every product Knauf will ever build.

Contraints

A decade of legacy systems, a hacker attack, and a GDPR microscope.

• None of the legacy systems supported SSO. Most were built by internal IT teams, some over a decade ago, with no interoperability in mind. The migration path had to be designed around systems that were never meant to be replaced — only extended.
• Knauf suffered a significant hacker attack in 2020. This placed the Knauf Account under intense security scrutiny, particularly in Germany, and introduced hard requirements around authentication standards, data residency, and audit trails that shaped the platform's architecture from day one.
• Country teams had genuine concerns about losing autonomy. Their reliance on internally built systems wasn't just familiarity — it was ownership. Designing a platform that centralised identity while preserving the feeling of local control was one of the hardest non-design problems on this project.

We conducted deep research across markets, brands, and teams to understand how access flows affected onboarding, retention, and sales.
Cross-country stakeholder interviews (Brands, Sales, CRM) • Technical audits of all legacy access systems • UX research with applicators, contractors, architects • CRM data analysis

Key Insights

• One customer had up to 5–12 accounts. Different countries, different apps, different portals.
• Onboarding dropped at the “create account” step across apps. Access friction blocked activation everywhere.
• No team-level management meant zero visibility for enterprise clients. Admins couldn’t control access or roles.
• Pricing, content, and permissions were misaligned. Users got the wrong prices, wrong content, or wrong access.
• CRM data was fragmented and incomplete. Sales teams couldn’t trust customer information.

PMF Hypothesis

If Knauf customers can access all tools with one account, and if that account becomes the single source of truth, then activation will increase across all apps, CRM data will improve, and support workload will drop significantly.

Scope decisions Desktop-first; compatibility with new Knauf Apps vs legacy apps has priority; Localization is key

• SSO One account for all products.
• Team management Give customers a team workspace with role & permission settings for each app.
• Personalization Provide customers personalized experiences and data.

Key Feature 1: One Account for All Knauf

The core of the platform: One login. One profile. One company. One identity.

Highlights

Single sign-on (SSO) across all Knauf apps

Consolidation of dozens of legacy accounts. Migration path for old country-based systems. Stronger authentication + enterprise-grade security

Unified customer and company profiles

Centralize all data, access, and service offerings on company and user level.

Impact

Customers now had one Knauf Account (instead dozens) for everything Knauf.

Key Feature 2: Team Management & Permissions

A foundational capability for enterprise clients. A shared single source of truth, and the foundation for team collabiration on our platform.

Highlights

Create and manage teams

Create teams based on function, project, and location.

Invite users or approve join requests

Customers can invite team mates during onboarding or when creating projects, and manage join requests from their team mates.

Define roles & permissions per app

Projects can have very sensistive data. Our customers can define clear roles and persmissions on what the team mates can do, and what they can see. On project level, location level, and app level.

Impact

This turned Knauf Account into an enterprise-grade IAM (Identity and Access Management) layer.

Key Feature 3: Personalized Experiences & Pricing

With a unified identity, personalization becomes possible. Prices and data are not just different from country to country. But also from customer to customer. Before, we were not able to provide prices because of this, now we can show everyone their exact, personalized prices.

Highlights

Customer type → tailored experience

The experience for every user is tailored to their customer type (specifier, applicator, dealer), so we can provide each user value asap.

Country → localized content

Not just marketing content. Products, construction requirements, regulations are very different in each country. This depends on the customers location, but also on the projects location.

Company → personalized pricing

Every customer negotiates different prices for different products or product categories; sometimes for each project. This can change every year. The Knauf account now enables us to show every customer the exact price for their project.

Impact

This powered activation loops across the ecosystem — users see “their Knauf,” not a generic interface.”

Because Knauf Account was infrastructure, its impact multiplied across everything built after it.

The design system scaled to all four products, cutting delivery time by 40%. Identity solved once meant every downstream team could focus on value, not access. I used this project to formalise the Knauf Growth Guild and introduce UX Maturity Assessments across markets.

Knauf Account didn't just unlock better products — it unlocked a better organisation.

The architecture of the Knauf Account was right: one identity, one source of truth, one onboarding flow adaptable to every customer type.
What we didn't invest enough in early was the migration experience for users who already had 5–12 existing accounts. For them, the "new account" wasn't a fresh start — it was yet another system asking them to do something.

We designed the migration as a technical handoff rather than a user experience in its own right, and support tickets in the first eight weeks reflected that.

I'd dedicate a full design sprint to the migration flow before launch. The other lesson: team management was scoped as a secondary feature and it became the reason enterprise clients adopted the platform at all.
We got lucky that the initial version was good enough — but we should have validated enterprise team workflows much earlier in discovery.