07·Product
Innovation Portal
Internal cockpit for the BARNES Dubai innovation team: project tracking, multilingual RBAC (EN / FR / AR), embedded Apache Superset BI, and a marketing-engineering toolkit (SEO/AEO/GEO, competitor console, Data Atlas, 3D Scans, CRM Copilot, an in-portal Barnes Dubai LLM assistant, and an AI content studio for marketing scripts and storyboards).
ResultLive internally, the single surface from which the BARNES Dubai team runs 23 innovation projects, 170 milestones, 345 tests, and the AEO/SEO + Barnes Dubai LLM tooling.
Discover
Why it exists.
BARNES Dubai's innovation programme runs twenty-plus projects in parallel, Atlas, the Splat Viewer, Barnes Dubai LLM, the 3DGS research pipeline, the Smart Deals site, plus a long tail of prototypes and partnerships. Executives need a single surface to see where everything stands; partners need a way in that does not require a stakeholder briefing; researchers need a documents library that does not live in someone's email.
Innovation Portal is that surface. One Next.js app that hosts every project's status, research evidence, document workspace, and embedded BI, with multilingual role-based access so a Paris executive and a Dubai researcher see the same source of truth in different languages and with different permissions.
StackNext.js · React · TypeScript · Apache Superset · PostgreSQL · RBAC · i18n
Define
The brief.
Give a multilingual, role-gated team one cockpit for every project's status, evidence, and analytics, instead of a scatter of tools and inboxes.
Develop
What it took
Skills behind it.
Primary discipline plus the support stack.
Skills demonstrated
- Product StrategyPrimary
Designed the cockpit IA, OVERVIEW (Dashboard / Projects / Updates), KNOWLEDGE (Data Atlas / 3D Scans / Documents), TOOLS (Barnes Dubai LLM, AEO/SEO, Translate, CRM Copilot, Uptime).
- Frontend EngineeringSecondary
Next.js + React app with dense data UI, multilingual RBAC, and embedded Superset analytics surfaces.
- Backend EngineeringSecondary
Auth, role gating, project + milestone + test telemetry pipelines, and integration with the Barnes Dubai LLM inference stack.
- Marketing & BDSupporting
AEO/SEO/GEO tool surface: keyword + prompt research, generative-engine visibility scoring, AI-answer-engine tracking across ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity / Gemini.
- Creative Content QA & IdeationSupporting
Creative content QA and ideation for the marketing toolkit, reviewing AI-drafted copy and AEO answers before they ship.
Develop · Build
How it came together.
- 01
Cards over dashboards
The home view is a grid of project cards, not a dashboard of KPIs. Each card holds the project's status, category, and short description. Filtering and sorting happen at the card level, which keeps the IA flat, every project is one click in. Dashboards full of widgets nobody clicks were the anti-pattern we deliberately rejected.
Product Strategy - 02
Auth.js with role tiers, not feature flags
Executives, researchers, partners, and external reviewers see different slices of the same data. Encoded as role tiers in Auth.js with policy gates on the routes, not as feature flags in the UI. Keeps the access model legible, a partner cannot accidentally see an unannounced project because of a flag misconfiguration.
Backend Engineering - 03
Embedded Superset for the analytics that matter
Embedded Apache Superset for the live valuation analytics and the project-level traffic metrics. Embedding (not screenshotting, not re-building in Next) means the chart the executive sees on the portal is the same chart the analyst is editing in Superset, one source, two surfaces.
Frontend Engineering - 04
Timeline as a shared story
Every project's commits, deploys, and milestones land on one chronological timeline. Stakeholders read it as the story of the programme; the project leads use it as their own activity feed. Auto-ingested from
Web Designgit logand the CRM, so it is never out of date.
Develop · Forks
Decisions on the record.
The few calls worth defending. Each one is a fork; the other branch would have been a different project.
Decision · 01
Why server-rendered Next.js, not an SPA
The cockpit is a dense data UI accessed by ~30 internal users, mostly on Dubai office desktops. Server-rendered Next.js gets the auth check, role gating, and first paint into the same round-trip, so a broker who lands on /projects sees their permitted slice in under a second. An SPA would have moved auth into the client and cost a flash-of-empty-state every navigation.
Decision · 02
Why a single proxy on :8443, not per-tool domains
AEO/SEO, Barnes Dubai LLM, Atlas embed, Translate, and Superset all live under one TLS-terminated proxy. One cert, one auth surface, one host the team types. The alternative, sub-domain-per-tool, would have multiplied the cookie scope, the SSO surface, and the CSP headache without buying separation that actually mattered for an internal product.
Decision · 03
Why embed Superset, not rebuild charts
Apache Superset already does the dense charting + SQL-Lab workflow that any rebuild would spend six months chasing. Embedding it under the portal nav kept the team in one cockpit while letting the analytics surface evolve on Superset's release cadence, not the portal's. The portal owns the auth shell; Superset owns the chart engine.
Deliver
What shipped.
LiveLive internally, the single surface from which the BARNES Dubai team runs 23 innovation projects, 170 milestones, 345 tests, and the AEO/SEO + Barnes Dubai LLM tooling.
Live as the executive surface for the BARNES Dubai innovation programme. Every other project here, Splat Viewer, Atlas, Barnes Dubai LLM, the 3DGS research, ships into Innovation Portal as its delivery surface. The portal's design system is what later projects adopt for their own surfaces.
By the numbers
Innovation projects
Milestones
Tests