Fleet at Scale: Designing STIHL's Connected Fleet Management Portal from Concept to Launch
3 min read · 765 words
The Challenge
STIHL AG — a global leader in power tools and outdoor equipment — faced a growing need among its professional customers: grounds maintenance teams and landscaping businesses were operating fleets of robotic mowers and connected tools across multiple sites, with no unified way to manage them. Checking device status, adjusting mowing schedules, or performing configuration changes meant dealing with individual devices one at a time — a process that simply does not scale when you are responsible for dozens or hundreds of machines.
The business problem ran deeper than convenience. Without centralized visibility, fleet operators had limited ability to respond to issues in real time, maintain consistent mowing configurations across sites, or make informed decisions about equipment utilization. For STIHL, serving this professional segment well was not just a product improvement — it was a strategic move to strengthen its position with commercial customers who demand operational efficiency.
The challenge, then, was to design a web application that could handle the genuine complexity of fleet management — live device status, bulk actions, granular mowing configuration — while remaining clear and usable for professionals whose primary job is managing land, not navigating software.
The Approach
Taking on the role of Senior UX Lead, the work began at the problem definition stage rather than jumping straight to screens. The priority was to understand the mental models of professional fleet operators: how they think about groups of machines, what decisions they need to make quickly, and where the highest points of friction exist in their current workflows.
From this foundation, concept development focused on how to present fleet-scale data without overwhelming users. Large tables of device information are a common solution in fleet tools — and a common failure point. The design decisions here centered on making bulk actions discoverable and safe, ensuring that users could act on a selection of machines with confidence rather than anxiety about unintended consequences. Hierarchy within tables, clear state indicators for live device status, and a logical structure for mowing configuration were all worked through in low-fidelity before any visual polish was applied.
A deliberate choice was made to invest heavily in data-layer specification alongside the UX work. Rather than leaving engineers to interpret design intent when it came to every table column, filter, and chart, a full specification was produced for each data component in the portal. This decision closed the gap between design and development, reducing ambiguity during build and giving the engineering team a clear contract to work against.
High-fidelity prototyping was used not as a final sign-off step but as an active tool for stress-testing decisions — simulating real fleet scenarios with varied device states, edge cases, and bulk action flows before anything reached production.
The Solution
The delivered work covered the full design scope of the connected.stihl.com fleet management portal, from early concepts through to production-ready UI:
- Concept documentation capturing the structural logic of the fleet management experience and the reasoning behind key design decisions
- Low- and high-fidelity prototypes used to validate flows and communicate design intent across the project team
- Production-ready UI design covering all core portal views: fleet overview, device detail, bulk action workflows, and mowing configuration at scale
- Full data-layer specification for every table, filter, and chart in the portal — detailing data types, states, interactions, and edge cases
The result was a design system and specification set that engineering could take directly into build, without requiring ongoing design interpretation during development.
The Results
The connected.stihl.com portal shipped — moving from ideation to a launched product with a complete, production-ready design system behind it.
For a project of this scope and complexity, that outcome carries real weight. Fleet management tools are notoriously difficult to get right: they must handle high data density, real-time state changes, and actions with operational consequences, all within an interface that professionals will use under time pressure. Delivering a coherent, fully specified design across that entire surface — from concept through to launch-ready assets — required sustained design leadership rather than task execution.
The full data-layer specification, in particular, represented a concrete artifact that went beyond what many design engagements produce. By documenting the logic behind every data component, the project left STIHL's engineering and product teams with a durable reference that would continue to serve the product well beyond the initial launch.
The platform now gives STIHL's professional customers a single place to oversee their connected equipment — live status, bulk configuration, and fleet-wide control — at the scale their work demands.