PAULO FREITASProduct Designer + Engineer

LOSANI HOMES • ENTERPRISE B2B • 2025

Community microsites without engineering bottlenecks

BuiltOps community microsite platform — Losani Homes
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
2024 – 2025
Team
Losani + engineering partners
Skills
Enterprise product systems, Cross-functional leadership with PM and Eng, Systems thinking and design systems

Proof

Problem

Losani needed community-specific web experiences that could launch at different lifecycle stages — future land, coming soon, available now — while marketing teams updated copy and pricing without waiting on engineering for every change.

The product surface spans buyers, sales, and admin workflows. Complexity comes from multi-role needs, not from visual decoration.

Process

I designed BuiltOps as a modular platform: Next.js 16, Tailwind CSS 4, Payload CMS, TypeScript — SQLite locally, Postgres in production.

Templates encode stage logic in code (safety rails) while editorial content stays flexible in the CMS. Empty sections hide automatically so half-finished pages never ship broken.

Deliverables include community pages, model pages, a version archive, preview-version widget catalog, and lot editor tooling — coordinated with the Losani Connected Site integration.

Outcome

Working platform integrated into the Losani connected-site repo with PR #7 — preview deploy live, production alias pending admin handoff.

Marketing can iterate copy and media in Payload while design maintains layout integrity and stage rules in code.

What I'd do differently

Lock CMS field schemas with design earlier — a few retrofits were needed when marketing wanted section variants we hadn't modeled.

My role

Owned

  • Platform UX for community and model pages
  • Editorial vs. engineering boundary (Payload CMS vs. layout code)
  • Stage-aware page templates (Future / Coming Soon / Available Now)
  • Preview, version archive, and draft workflows

Did not own

  • Losani corporate brand governance
  • Production infrastructure and Vercel team admin
  • Sales CRM integrations

Collaborators: Elevow and Losani Homes teams

Key decisions

Decision 1

Hardcoded pages vs. CMS-owned content

Chose: Payload owns copy, images, prices, links, section order, users, and version history. Code owns layout, design, hide-if-empty rules, and stage safety rails.

Rejected: Fully hardcoded marketing pages — fast initially, but every copy change became an engineering ticket and blocked the marketing team.

Decision 2

Single site vs. modular subpages

Chose: BuiltOps as a vendored module inside the connected-site repo — community subpages proxied through the portal origin so buyers stay in one experience.

Rejected: Standalone microsites per community with no shared system. Unmaintainable at scale.

Decision 3

Preview fidelity

Chose: Draft preview + `/old` version archive with frozen playgrounds so stakeholders can compare iterations without risking production.

Rejected: Screenshot-based review only. Stakeholders couldn't validate responsive behavior or CMS-driven edge cases.