Ashok Leyland

Engage

Speed was the premise. The work was knowing what to customize.

Ashok Leyland's new intranet was built on Styria, Tarento's own accelerator, that was the engagement from day one, not a choice made along the way. The real problem was deciding how far to customize a shared foundation for one client without eroding the speed it was built to deliver.

The problem

The foundation was a given. The customization boundary wasn't.

The engagement was never a blank page. Tarento already had Styria, an internal accelerator built to deliver enterprise platforms fast, and building Engage on top of it was the deal from day one. The real problem was how far to customize it before it stopped being fast.

The research that did happen wasn't formal, it was discovery aimed at exactly that question, understanding what Ashok Leyland actually needed and which of those needs the accelerator's defaults already covered.

Approach

Three decisions, none of them about the interface first.

With speed already the premise of the engagement, the real design job was deciding precisely where to deviate from Styria's defaults and where to leave them alone.

Decision 01 · Load-bearing

Customized only where legacy expectations actually demanded it.

Over-customizing would have quietly erased the speed advantage the accelerator existed to deliver. Under-customizing would have shipped something that didn't match how Ashok Leyland's teams actually worked. Discovery told us where that line sat, module by module.

Decision 02

Treated the legacy platform itself as the research artifact.

No formal user research ran on this engagement. Discovery meant sitting with the existing intranet directly, seeing what got used constantly and what expectations teams carried over from the old system.

Decision 03

Co-directed product thinking rather than owning direction solo.

Styria being a cross-organisation investment meant direction was set jointly with Tarento's Innovation Head, not owned solo the way it was on iGOT, a different ownership model for a different kind of engagement.

Outcome

Shipped in six months, already on to phase two.

6 months

Enterprise-grade intranet delivered, on a foundation that stayed fast because customization was scoped deliberately.

Early 2026

Formally launched, following a mid-2025 build start.

Phase 2 underway

Ashok Leyland has already commissioned an AI-first refresh of the platform.

Reflection

Discovery instead of formal research was the right trade for an internal tool on this timeline, and Ashok Leyland trusting us with a second phase almost immediately is the clearest evidence it worked. That second phase is its own problem, designing an AI-first refresh inside the limits of a legacy API instead of around them.