Marlin

Platform for Directors of Engineering in charge of large-scale properties to quickly identify & act on issues related to water equipment.

Watts $3 Billion Revenue - Product Live as “Nexa Platform”

TIMELINE & SCOPE

4 month 0-1 Incubation & MVP Build

Sept - Dec 2022

  • MVP Definition

  • 0-1 Build for Alpha Phase - Desktop Screens

  • Suggestion of Mobile Screens

CORE TEAM

16 People

  • 1 Venture General Manager

  • 2 Product Managers

  • 6 Engineers

  • 3 Experience Designers

  • 2 Design Researchers

  • 2 Strategy/Go-to-Market Consultants

MY ROLE

End-to-End Designer

  • Owned end-to-end designer for 3-4 Features

    • Prototyping

    • User testing

    • Dev-Ready Designs with Edge Cases

    • Leading Design Reviews

  • Branding and UI Definition

  • Journey Mapping & IA

  • Building Design System

PROBLEM

Water temperature & pressure are major issue of guest complaints in large-scale hotels

  • Hotels experience up to a 30–40% variation in hot-water temperature.

  • In a 1,000-unit property such leaks can cost up to US $8,000 per day if left undetected.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT 1

Directors of Engineering (DOEs) struggle to monitor, track and report water problems in their properties.

QUALITATIVE

“I’m constantly piecing together data from different teams and equipment just to understand what’s happening.”

QUANTITATIVE

  • DOEs spend 3x/day, 2+ hours of mandatory entering data and check up - the process is heavily manual.

  • 70%+ of hotels rely on physical walkthroughs for equipment and system checks.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT 2

DOEs are notified of water issues too late, usually when customers complain, which gives them low satisfaction scores.

QUALITATIVE

“Most of the time, I only hear about water problems when a guest complains — and by then, it’s already hurt our scores.”

QUANTITATIVE

60% of hotels report that maintenance issues are found reactively rather than through monitoring

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT 3

DOEs need to see raw temperature and pressure readings to diagnose the issue themselves.

QUALITATIVE

“Don’t just tell me there’s an issue — show me the temperature and pressure. I need the raw readings to figure out what’s actually going on.”

QUANTITATIVE

Temperature and pressure trends are the fastest way to diagnose 80–90% of domestic hot-water issues

THE SOLUTION

A connected platform that proactively alerts DOEs of issues with their equipment as soon as they arise

Homepage

The homepage offers DOEs a quick glance of the property they’re overseeing, focusing on mecanical rooms, because it was reported to be the most critical for DOEs.

The hierarchy of Location, Equipment and Devices is clearly laid out in each card for users to quickly see the root cause of the problem. Any issues with readings are highlighted and clearly visible to users.

Asset Creation

Users can create new locations, equipment pieces and devices on Marlin to view their water systems hierarchy on the platform.

They can attach metadata for each asset and assign parent/children relationships between the assets to clearly define their system hierarchy.

Asset Detail

Once a user clicks into a specific asset, whether a location, equipment or device, they can see the asset’s metadata at a quick glance, and see all its children assets. Quick filters allow users to view and manage their assets, and quickly get to a device reading.

Automations

This feature allows users to configure Automations with flexibility, as DOEs reported that they want the ability tailor their alerts to the events that occur.

Users can assign a criticality level to each automation, and trigger custom alerts based on conditions that they define.

Alerts

In the Alerts Center, users can see an overview of ongoing and resolved alerts, prioritized by criticality.

Users have the ability to filter through different alerts by location, equipment, device or criticality.

Logo

Water | Dynamic | Fluid | Modern

UI & DESIGN SYSTEM

Design Tokens

While leveraging MUI’s foundational system, Marlin designers have adjusted some design tokens for Marlin’s own branding that aligns with Watts’ design principles.

UI & DESIGN SYSTEM

Components

We created components used repeatedly are stored in the components. This helps designers to create and manage consistent designs across the platform.