Overview
B2B SaaS platform for construction applicators
Knauf Material Calculator is a B2B SaaS platform helping construction applicators quote, plan, and order materials in minutes instead of hours.
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.
Product Design Manager, 12 markets
PO, Eng, Data, Design
B2B SaaS platform for construction professionals
0 →1→n
18 months
Key Results
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.
Challenge
Delays led to quote errors costing millions in lost bids.
Project leads and applicators were spending hours moving between Excel sheets, PDFs, and phone calls, trying to calculate quantities, submit tenders, and order materials.Applicator: Contractors, on-site professionals who plan, measure, and execute installations.
The Problem
Construction professionals managed tenders, calculations, and orders across Excel sheets, PDFs, and calls, leading to:
- Error-prone manual calculations
- Re-entry of data across fragmented tools
- Lack of visibility on profitability
- Low trust in “digital tools made for construction”
The Goal
Build a unified, end-to-end platform that helps applicators plan jobs faster, make fewer mistakes, and order materials with confidence. An end-to-end material management platform that:
- Helps users reach value (first quote sent) within 15 minutes
- Bridges quote → plan → order seamlessly
- Builds trust through precision and reliability
Contraints
One product, five legacy schemas, twelve markets.
The technical and political landscape was as fragmented as the workflows we were replacing.- Every Knauf entity ran its own ERP, SAP, and order systems — each with a different data schema. I had to design for two realities simultaneously: a compatibility layer for legacy systems still in operation, and a forward-compatible schema for the new infrastructure being rolled out. Some countries required country-specific variations of both.
- Digital leaders and entity heads across markets had conflicting requirements and strong opinions on product direction. Aligning them without designing by committee was a constant negotiation.
- There was no central authority that could mandate adoption. Buy-in had to be earned market by market, which meant scope decisions were always political as well as design decisions.
Research
Discover the essential workflow that defines value.
Before designing, we needed to understand what “value” actually meant for our users.I led field visits and interviews across 12 countries — observing how crews plan, measure, and order. We combined JTBD analysis, expert interviews, and a survey with 53 applicators in Germany.
Field shadowing • Expert interviews (12 countries) • JTBD analysis • UX surveys (n=53 DE).
Key Insights
- “Trustable numbers” mattered more than UI polish.
- Applicators didn’t want more tools, they wanted one place that just works.
- Offline-first and minimal input were must-haves.
PMF Hypothesis
“If applicators can quote, plan, and order in one workspace, they’ll make fewer mistakes and be more profitable; returning within one month to create another quote.”
Foundational Research I invested a whole year into user research, interviews, field visits, etc. This is an excerpt from one of our Interviews I made. There was no clear understanding of our customers in the company. Their daily tasks, their problems, their needs.
Construction Project Journey I mapped everything onto something I called the “project Journey” which shows how a construction projects flows through all our customer types. This became our roadmap.
Scalability Assessment For each initiative we assessed the scalability of each initiative. How big is the problem globally that we are aiming to solve.
Solution
Designing for Activation
Once the problem was clear, we focused on time-to-value, helping users reach their “aha moment” (sending the first quote) within 15 minutes.Scope decisions Desktop-first; all-in-one app; design system prioritized to accelerate delivery across 4 apps.
- Tender Capture Read, capture, & translate tenders of any format into structured inputs
- In-Plan Measurement Determine masses & quantities on plans & to tender positions.
- Material Order & Tracking Order by floor, wall type, phase, or element; track ordering status.
- Project KPIs & Documentation Proof of acceptance, certificates, and project health.
First Sketches With quick sketches I made, I was able to align with stakeholders and customers on the best concept to continue.
Sitemap I designed a sitemap that not only organizes the screens, but the actual workflow of the users.
Wireframes Wireframes and flows, even if very high-level, helped us allocate the screen-real-estate for these information dense screens and complex workflows.
Design System I analyzed the wireframes from this and all other products to destill the most common design artifacts. From that I built an atomic design system that keeps consistency and provides scalability.
Templates Also, I defined base templates for common use cases across all prodcuts, and specifically for each product themselves.
Key Feature 1: Tender Capture
Every tender arrived in a different format — Excel, PDF, or even hand-written. I built a guided import flow that parses items and matches them to Knauf’s product systems.
Highlights
Tenders arrive in every format imaginable. I built a structured quoting interface that can parse tender items and maps them to Knauf systems, so downstream steps inherit clean, linked data.
Quote Tracking
An overview of the quotes sent, but even more important, an overview of quote drafts with highlighted due-dates. Helping you find the most urgent actions on the screen.
Tender to Quote
New business starts with a tender, and providing a quote asap. Instead of manually transfering each position, customers can import the tender directly in seconds.
Quote to Project
After a Tender has been won and approved, it can be converted into a construction project in one click. Users can import all existing information and offering to add new resources like floor-plans.
Impact
Early trust increased: users saw reliable, structured data from the start
"This is the tool I was looking for. Finally everything in one place."
Key Feature 2: In-Plan Measurement
Applicators could now measure directly on their digital plans, and link results to tender positions. From site measurements → plan → exact quantities → approved order in minutes.
Highlights
Take-offs & ordering happens across PDFs, spreadsheets, & calls; fragmented, error-prone, and slow. I bring them together: users can measure in plans, link elements to a tender position & turn those results into orders.
Plan Measurement tools
Users can plan mm-exact measurements and directly assign positions from the quote. Intuitive usage with immediate results.
Real-time quantity calculation
By making mm-exact measurements on the plan, the quantities of the matching positions get calculated in real-time; per wall, floor, or phase
Impact
Major confidence boost among early users
"With this system, there is no guessworking anymore, no blackspots between the team. We all know, what has been planned, what material do we need mm-exact."
Key Feature 3: Material Order & Tracking
Ordering materials used to happen over phone calls and guesswork. We introduced structured, flexible ordering, by floor, phase, or wall type; plus real-time delivery tracking.
Highlights
Split orders by date or project phase
Order material according to need. By floor, wall type, construction phase, element. Whatever the user needs.
Built-in delivery scheduling
Tracking orders & deliveries on a construction is complex, messy, and time-sensitive. Our order tracking provides real-time status that can be filtered down to any phase, section, floor, wall-type, etc. to give users the ETA they need.
Impact
Trust built between Knauf, dealers, and applicators
"Now I finally have a clear picture of my orders and deliveries."
Results
Success in numbers
Knauf Material Calculator became the core product in Knauf’s digital ecosystem, adopted across 12 European markets.| Metric | Δ |
|---|---|
| Activation | +18% |
| Time to Aha | -35% (from 43 min to 10 min) |
| 7-Day Retention | +30% |
| Plan→Order Conversion | +18pp |
| Customer Admin Work | -20h/week |
| Service Calls | -20% |
| NPS | 15 |
The Material Calculator didn't just ship — it became the template for how Knauf Digital builds. The design system I created for this product scaled across all four Knauf apps, cutting design-to-delivery time by 40%.
The research rigour I introduced here — field research, JTBD framing, PMF hypotheses — became the team's standard operating model, formalised into a cross-functional Growth Guild and company-wide UX Maturity Assessments.
What started as a quoting tool for construction sites became the foundation for how an entire innovation unit works.
Reflection
We were right to go slow — but slow in the wrong direction.
Spending a full year on research before designing was the right instinct. Spending it without defining success metrics upfront was the mistake.We knew what "value" looked like qualitatively before we started building — a quote sent, a plan linked, an order placed.
What we didn't define early enough was how we'd measure whether users reached it. We instrumented the product about six weeks post-launch, which meant we lost an entire cohort of early adopters whose drop-off patterns could have shaped the onboarding flow before it scaled to 12 markets.
If I were doing this again, I'd write the measurement plan on day one of design, not day one after launch.
The design system was the right call — it cut delivery time across all four products — but the early atomisation created some rigidity in product-specific edge cases that the teams had to work around later.
That's a tradeoff I'd make again, but I'd budget one dedicated sprint at the three-month mark to review what the system wasn't covering.
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