B2B PRODCUT DESIGN
Penske: Recognition
Tracker
Penske Entertainment Corp., a subsidiary of Penske Corporation, owns the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the NTT INDYCAR SERIES and IMS Productions.
MY ROLE
Redesigning a one-off client tracker to fit the core platform, without losing the brand identity that made it Penske's or breaking the grandfathered relationship
Penske was a grandfathered C.A. Short client running a one off, brand specific design outside the standard platform, built around their identity as the largest sponsor in racing but no longer aligned with the main product. C.A. Short brought me in to redesign the tracker to fit the core platform without losing what made it Penske's.
I led the design end to end, translating the racetrack concept into the Points Tracker and Record Tracker now live on their dashboard. Given the one off nature of the work, the Product Owner gathered feedback and sign off directly from the Penske representative through regular one on ones, bypassing the formal review process used for standard flows. My scope covered the full visual and interaction design of both trackers.
TEAM
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Senior Product Designer (My Role)
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Junior Product Designer
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Graphic Designer
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Product Manager
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Director of IT
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Engineering Team
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Executive Stakeholders
SCOPE
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Research, Hi-fidelity designs, User flows, Accessibility, Dev Handoff.
THE PROBLEM
Built outside the system but was meant to live in
Penske's points tracker had been built outside the main platform and no longer matched it. As the core app evolved, the old tracker couldn't keep up visually or structurally it needed a full redesign to fit back into the product it was supposed to live inside.
APPROACH
Built to match the brand,
not just the client
Penske is the largest sponsor in racing, and that identity became the design brief. Instead of a generic progress bar, the tracker became a racetrack: a rounded circuit with the Penske truck driving the lap, point thresholds standing in for mile markers, and the milestone that mattered most consecutive years completed anchored at the center.
A companion Record Tracker carried the same idea vertically, a checkpoint list running from "Starting Line" to "Today," each milestone flagged and color-coded as it was reached.
KEY DECISIONS
Decisions worth explaining
With a 1-month engagement, I redesigned the Penske point tracker, modernized the one-off design, established a scalable design system, and partnered closely with product, engineering, and leadership teams to support a company-wide rebrand initiative.
DECISION 1
Keep the racetrack concept
The design leaned fully into Penske's identity as the largest sponsor in racing, matching what already existed rather than replacing it with the standard C.A. Short pattern.
DECISION 2
Skip the formal review
Because this was a one off client relationship, feedback and sign off happened directly between the Product Owner and the Penske representative through regular one on ones, instead of the standard multi stage review used for other flows.
DECISION 3
Grandfather the relationship
After this project, C.A. Short stopped offering custom builds to clients going forward, but made an exception for Penske to preserve the existing relationship.
COLLABORATION
Getting things done through
team involvement
Enterprise redesigns don't ship on design quality alone. I kept alignment tight across a cross-functional team throughout the full engagement.
I made a point to include the junior designer in testing and design critiques, not just for output, but for knowledge transfer. The work needed to live on after the engagement ended.
HI-FIDELITY DESIGNS
Final Designs
By involving stakeholders throughout the process, we reduced ambiguity, accelerated decision-making, and created smoother developer handoffs.
Before
After: Default View
After: View #1
After: View #2
After: View #4
After: View #5
Tablet - Responsive
Mobile - Responsive
DESIGN HANDOFF
A shortcut earned by the exception itself
Because this was a one-off build rather than a standard flow, the handoff skipped the usual formal review process. The product owner surfaced the designs directly to the Penske representative through their regular one-on-one sessions, gathered feedback in that same informal setting, and got sign-off there; no separate review cycle was required.
IMPACT
A one-off that reshaped the offer
The result was a fully custom, on-brand experience built for one client alone a level of customization the business doesn't typically offer. It became a turning point internally: shortly after, the decision was made to stop building one-off designs for clients going forward. Penske kept theirs, grandfathered in, because the relationship was worth the exception.
CONCLUSION
Custom fits perfectly, but it doesnt scale.
The Penske tracker shows the tension in building white-label products for individual brands: the more perfectly a design fits one client, the harder it is to scale. Sometimes the right call is the custom build. Sometimes it's the policy that follows it.
NEXT CASE STUDY
A case study of all the iterations was not possible. So below are images of other iterations during my time with Nixon. To decide what solution works best it's important to understand why some design solutions will not solve the problem.
