Alex Cosmas
Product, UX, and engineering across complex systems
Case study
Simple Formations – Product leadership from concept to compliance platform
Over five years at Simple Formations, I went from UX developer to product lead on a platform that helps industry professionals automate company formation and stay compliant in Kenya. This case study shares how the product, my role, and the underlying systems evolved over time.
Project snapshot
I joined when Simple Formations was still a rough concept. A small group of us took scattered legal workflows and turned them into a working product. As the platform matured, my role shifted from hands-on execution to setting direction: shaping the information architecture, defining priorities, and connecting engineering, design, and compliance so we could ship real features under real constraints.
Key Impact Metrics
Practitioner leverage (5 → 50 companies)
Average time savings across workflows
Average risk reduction
Role evolution
My responsibilities changed as the platform grew. I started in the work, then moved into system thinking and product leadership.
Year 1–2 · Execution
- Built early interfaces and flows from scratch.
- Turned ideas into usable product features.
- Worked closely with engineering to ship first versions.
Year 2–3 · UX architecture
- Mapped user journeys across formation, filings, and account management.
- Defined the information architecture tying flows together.
- Standardized patterns so new features felt part of one system.
Year 3–4 · Product leadership
- Set product direction and priorities with founders.
- Connected engineering, design, and compliance around shared goals.
- Focused on creating clarity so the team could deliver.
Year 4–5 · Scale and refinement
- Drove adoption and onboarding for new practitioners and firms.
- Refined workflows based on real usage and ops feedback.
- Prepared the platform for regulatory changes and new service lines.
Problem and constraints
Starting and running a company in Kenya involves multiple agencies, shifting regulations, and paperwork that is often opaque to the people doing the work. Our users were industry professionals responsible for getting details right under time pressure, not casual consumers.
We needed to design a platform that encoded complex legal workflows without hiding important details, kept companies compliant as rules changed, and respected how operations teams actually worked day to day. All under resource constraints typical of an early-stage product.
Product surface and UX architecture
Over time, Simple Formations grew into a set of connected modules rather than isolated flows:
Company formation
Create new entities with guided flows that respect local rules and required documents.
Director and shareholder management
Update control and ownership with traceability for internal teams and regulators.
Filings and renewals
Track and submit recurring obligations so companies stay compliant over time.
Compliance reminders and notifications
Surface upcoming deadlines in a way that fits how professionals manage their clients.
Internal tools for operations
Give ops teams workflows and status views that match their daily routines and edge cases.
Billing and account management
Handle plans, invoicing, and access in a way that does not fight the core workflows.
Early on, a lot of work happened as ad-hoc flows. My job was to turn those into a coherent product: deciding what belongs where, how professionals move between tasks, and how to make room for new workflows without breaking what already worked.
Flagship Features & Impact
1. Roles & Permissions – Governance as System
Problem: Manual permission management led to chaos – who can do what was unclear, and errors were frequent.
Solution: Role-based access control with permission templates tied to company structure.
Impact: 60% time savings + 95% fewer permission errors. Enabled practitioners to manage teams and delegate authority at scale.
Why it matters: Shows architectural depth in designing scalable access patterns that align with business structure.
2. Minute Book & Registers – Compliance as Byproduct
Problem: Scattered statutory records created compliance nightmares and audit risks.
Solution: Business actions automatically generate register entries, ensuring records are always current and consistent.
Impact: 70% time savings + 85% compliance risk reduction. Records are now audit-ready at all times.
Why it matters: Demonstrates deep regulatory understanding and how to automate compliance without manual checkboxes.
3. Application Review & Approval – Workflow Orchestration
Problem: Multi-party approvals were serial bottlenecks taking 2-3 weeks.
Solution: Parallel approvals with smart routing based on document type and stakeholder role.
Impact: 70% faster decisions + 100% no missing approvers.
Why it matters: Shows expertise in workflow engineering and optimizing business processes.
Bridging teams and leading through clarity
As the platform grew, my main job became creating clarity across disciplines.
- With engineering: Translated workflows into buildable units, negotiated scope when constraints were tight, and stayed close enough to the code to keep conversations grounded.
- With compliance and legal: Turned dense rules into flows and edge cases we could design and test for, instead of treating them as one-off tickets.
- With operations: Listened to how work actually happened, including all the messy exceptions, and fed that back into both design and implementation.
Not every feature worked the first time. We launched, watched where professionals or ops got stuck, and iterated. That rhythm of ship → observe → adjust is what moved the product from zero to something teams could rely on.
Design decisions and trade-offs
Building in a regulated space meant constant trade-offs between speed and correctness, simplicity and completeness, and self-serve vs. assisted workflows.
- Progressive disclosure: We surfaced only what users needed at each step, while keeping full detail accessible. Too much upfront overwhelmed; too little created compliance risk.
- Automation vs. control: Where regulation allowed, we automated. Where it required human judgment or audit trails, we designed clear handoff points instead of hiding complexity.
- Single source of truth: Company state, filings, and obligations lived in one system. Duplication led to the kinds of errors our users could not afford.
Outcomes and what's next
Over five years we went from an idea on paper to a platform that industry professionals use to start and run companies with more confidence and less friction.
- Consolidated fragmented manual steps into a set of clear flows and tools.
- Gave professionals and ops a shared source of truth for company state and obligations.
- Built a product foundation that can grow as regulations and services evolve.
If I were to extend this work further, I would focus on surfacing more real-time insights back to professionals, deepening self-serve capabilities where regulation allows, and continuing to tighten the feedback loop between usage, ops, and product decisions.