Due to inexperience, I was ok with submitting a scope of work with over half of the project not solidly defined by tasks. The scope kept expanding and I realized I was in danger of going scope creep.

At the time I did not realize that admin portals need to fit extremely specific needs and context of whoever is using them. Our client explored other admin portal services but ultimately found no best fits. This was not an issue in itself. The issue was that the client did not have a clear picture of what they needed and I did not have the foresight to draw that out of the client with proper need-finding or present my own ideas to try and guide the process.

How did I handle this?

I sought guidance from my team and ultimately the project manager came in and helped me communicate what I needed from the client design wise. But that only fixed the information deficit.

I still had the time deficit, and to address this, I made the designs far less visually branded than the mobile app. Given the limited amount of users and their higher expertise level, this was an acceptable tradeoff for the time it ultimately saved.