B2B Case Study
Designing a SaaS Multi-Tenant Admin Platform
Challenge
As B2B SaaS products scale, administration becomes exponentially more complex. Platform teams must manage hundreds or thousands of tenants, each with different plans, feature access, billing states, and security requirements - while tenant admins need clarity and control without exposure to platform-level complexity.
- The challenge was to design a multi-tenant admin system that:
- Enables platform administrators to efficiently manage tenants, features, billing, and system health at scale.
- Provides tenant administrators with intuitive user, role, and permission management.
- Balances power and safety, preventing accidental misconfiguration.
- Scales gracefully as tenants, features, and permissions grow.
Design Goals
- Clear role boundaries: Platform admins and tenant admins have different mental models, responsibilities, and risk profiles.
- Information clarity: Admin tools are information-dense by necessity - but must still be scannable, predictable, and safe.
- Operational efficiency at scale: Actions must support bulk operations, overrides, and auditing without sacrificing clarity.
- Enterprise-grade trust: Clear status indicators, auditability, and permission transparency are essential for B2B credibility.
Users & Mental Models
- Keeps the platform running behind the scenes.
- Works across many customers at once, watching for risk, failures, and edge cases.
- Cares most about reliability, revenue impact, and avoiding mistakes at scale.
- Manages the system for their own team.
- Focuses on who has access and how work gets done day to day.
- Wants straightforward control without needing to understand the whole platform.
Platform Admin
Tenant Admin
Personas
Information Architecture Strategy
The information architecture separates platform-level governance from tenant-level day-to-day management.
| Platform Admin | Tenant Admin |
| System-wide visibility | Tenant-scoped visibility |
| Feature access & rol out | Enable features & settings |
| Plans, billing & revenue | Users and Permissions |
| Audit and compliance | Team management |
Platform Admin Tool
Research Goals
- Understand how platform admins think about tenants, features, and risk.
- Identify breakdowns in the current tool experience.
- Validate how tenant admins expect to manage users and permissions.
Research Methods Used
- User interviews and direct observation, including:
- Platform operations.
- Customer support.
- Finance and billing.
- Security and compliance.
- Key Insights:
- Admins focus on exceptions and edge cases, not ideal workflows.
- Overrides are common, but poorly tracked and inconsistently surfaced.
- Audit logs are used after problems occur, not as an early-warning tool.
- Observed Workflows
- Investigating a billing issue.
- Enabling a beta feature for select tenants.
- Responding to a system alert.
- This surfaced friction points around:
- Context switching across screens and systems.
- Limited visibility into current system state.
- Repetitive, manual actions for routine tasks.
Dashboard
- Notification grid with priority levels:
- Immediate system awareness and prioritization.
- Admins don’t “browse” - they respond. The dashboard is optimized for decision-making, not exploration.
- Enables admins to triage issues (billing failures, tenant suspensions, system alerts) without digging.
- Executive and operational KPI Tiles:
- Total users.
- System health.
- Monthly revenue.
- Tenant status.
- Global Tenant Search
- Optimized for support workflows where admins often start with “find the tenant.”
Manage Tenants
- Tenant list
- Plan type.
- Status.
- Total users.
- Start date.
- Tenant search.
Designed for pattern recognition (e.g., stalled tenants, growth signals) and fast drill-down.
Tenant Details
- Plan details and useage.
- Actions - Reset Password, Impersonate Tenant, Suspend Tenant.
- Add tenant.
Overview
Destructive or sensitive actions are visible but intentionally friction-aware to prevent misuse.
- Date range filtering.
- Payment ttatus indicators.
- Invoice download and print.
Subscriptions and Billing
Finance and support teams often need self-serve access to billing history without jumping tools.
- Plan-based, Beta, Security.
- ON/OFF toggles.
- Locked state.
- Clear override indicators.
Feature Flags
Feature availability must be understandable across plan defaults, tenant overrides, and betas without ambiguity.
Platform Management
- Global default states.
- Number of active tenants.
- Number of overrides.
Feature Management
Supports drill-in for more detail.
Feature Drill-In (modal)
- List all tenant overrides.
- Bulk selection to remove overrides.
Modal keeps admins in context while performing potentially high-impact actions, reducing navigation errors.
Platform Admin Success Metrics
Because platform admin tools are internal, operational, and high-risk, success is measured less by engagement and more by efficiency, accuracy, and confidence in decision-making.
Operational Efficiency
- Time to locate a tenant: Reduced from 45s to 15s, validating improvements to global search and tenant list scannability.
- Time to resolve a tenant issue: Reflects the effectiveness of dashboard alerts, tenant drill-in, and feature visibility.
- Bulk action usage rate: Indicates whether bulk overrides and management tools are reducing repetitive manual work.
Error & Risk Reduction
- Misconfiguration-related Incidents: Tracks whether locked features, explicit override states, and clearer audit trails reduce mistakes.
- Rollback time for feature overrides: Measures how quickly admins can recover when issues occur.
Tenant Admin Tool
Accessed directly within the product via an Admin button, reinforcing that this is a contextual extension, not a separate system.
Users
- Email.
- Role (selectable).
- Status.
- Last Login.
Focus on reducing friction for high-frequency tasks like onboarding, offboarding, and role changes. Inline editing and auto-save supports fast updates and eliminates risk of lost work.
Roles and Permissions
- Matrix View
- Users x Permissions.
- Checkbox assignment.
- Add new permissions.
This format mirrors how admins think about access control relationships, not isolated settings pages.
Settings
Tenant-specific configuration without exposure to platform-level concepts.
Tenant Admin Success Metrics
- Time to onboard a new user.
- Clarity of user and role management flows.
- Role/Permission assignment success rate.
- Reduced admin-related support tickets.
- Admin feature adoption rate.
Task Completion
Support Deflection
Engagement and Trust
Key UX Challenges & Solutions:
Reducing Risk for Platform Admins:
- Locked features and explicit override states.
- Grouped destructive actions.
- Grouped destructive actions.
- Audit logs for traceability and recovery.
Scaling Without Redesign:
- Modular information architecture.
- Feature-based governance.
- Bulk actions for repetitive tasks
- Consistent patterns.
Balancing Power & Usability (Tenant Admin Focus):
- Progressive disclosure of advanced controls.
- Contextual actions tied to people and roles.
- Clear separation between platform and tenant responsibilities.