Cicero Suite

Cicero is a library management suite used by public and academic libraries across Scandinavia. As part of the Library & Learning team at Systematic, I worked as a Junior UX Designer with an expanded scope that included product ownership responsibilities within our agile process.

My role

I was responsible for UX and visual UI design, grounded in domain expertise built through deep user research sessions with librarians and end-users. Alongside design work, I held the product owner role within our Scrum/Kanban process — which meant estimating and prioritising new features, bug fixes, and design debt alongside architects, project managers, and senior PMs.

Day-to-day this involved:

• Running and synthesising user research to inform design decisions
• Producing wireframes, UI designs, and prototypes in Figma
• Collaborating closely with developers to ensure design intent survived implementation
• Participating in sprint planning, backlog refinement, and stakeholder reviews
• Balancing user needs against technical constraints and business priorities

What I learned

Sitting at the intersection of design and product ownership gave me a clear view of where UX often loses influence — in the gap between design handoff and sprint planning. Being in both seats let me advocate for user needs at the point where trade-offs are actually made.

Working in a domain as specialised as library software also reinforced how much time domain knowledge is worth. The best design decisions came from understanding how a librarian’s day actually works — not from abstract UX principles.

Detailed case study and design artefacts available on request. Work is covered by NDA.