Tradebase
A closed, invite-only B2B platform for trading industrial metal scrap: 50+ companies buying, selling and hedging secondary metals with each other
My Role
About Product
About
Where a listing is a commitment
0 → 1We started from zero, with not a single document. I pulled the requirements out of conversations with the business and turned them into product architecture as we went
The work
Solving the problemThe bottleneck was creating a listing. In commodity trading a listing isn’t a form, it’s a commitment: grade, volume, quality, dates, site, delivery terms. Get a field wrong and you lose money, not time. So we measured completion rather than “usability” – how many people who started a deal actually closed it. We broke the listing into steps with a check at each one, moved rare parameters behind sensible defaults, and showed the consequences of a choice before confirmation rather than after. Then applied the same logic to hedging, where a mistake costs even more
Team
As the project scaled we hired two more designers and I became their lead: assigned work, ran reviews, and kept one interface language across web and mobile
Results
77% of users who started a deal completed it
89% on hedging
The product grew from web into a full mobile app
