Redesigning METYCLE around its traders

METYCLE is a B2B marketplace for secondary metals, connecting scrap sellers in Europe with buyers around the world. Deals are big. Six figures is normal. And the industry runs on relationships that took years to build.

When I joined after the Series A, the strategy was a self-service marketplace: sellers list material, buyers browse and transact, software in the middle. I spent 18 months designing exactly that. It worked as intended, and almost nobody used it.

The engagement data said the same thing for 18 months, and it took a while to admit what it meant. Users understood the marketplace fine. They just kept routing around it to get to our traders. Sellers wanted a person who knew the market, could vouch for the buyer, and would pick up the phone when a shipment went sideways. In this industry, the trader was the product all along.

Saying this out loud was uncomfortable, because it meant telling leadership that the thing I'd personally designed for a year and a half shouldn't be the priority anymore. I made the case anyway, with the behavioral data to back it up: don't try to replace the trader, equip the trader. Leadership agreed, and the roadmap changed.

Traders were running six-figure deals across personal spreadsheets, email, and memory. Leadership had already tried to fix this once with Pipedrive, and the rollout died quietly, because a CRM has its own idea of how deals work, and it wasn't the traders' idea.

So I started from the other end. I mapped how deals actually move, across roles, states, and dependencies. Then I built working prototypes in Lovable and sat with traders while they ran real deal scenarios through them, fixing things between sessions. By the time engineering picked it up, the workflows had already survived contact with the people who'd use them every day.

The result is the tool every trader now works in: one shared view of every in-flight deal, its status, its documents, its owner.

The product stopped competing with the trader and started working for them. Before, software was something customers were pushed toward and traders worked around. After, software holds the operational load so the humans can hold the relationships.

A strategy pivot that stays internal isn't finished. I led the redesign of the marketing site so the public story matched the real one: human-led trading, backed by software. Interactive prototypes got founders and sales aligned on the new positioning before any code existed, which made the arguments cheap.