The problem
The client’s ops team was stitching together project status from three different spreadsheets, two Slack channels, and a wiki page that nobody updated. Every Monday morning, the ops lead spent four hours pulling numbers together for a status meeting that lasted twenty minutes.
They needed one view: who is working on what, who is over capacity, and which clients are blocked waiting on us. Not a dashboard with twenty widgets. One screen that answered the three questions managers asked every day.
What we designed
We started by interviewing the ops lead, two project managers, and three engineers. Different roles, different questions. The ops lead wanted utilisation rollups. The PMs wanted to spot blockers early. The engineers wanted to know when their next gap was so they could request training time.
- Projects view: pipeline status, team assignment, client communication state
- Team view: each person’s allocations across active projects, with capacity headroom
- Clients view: communication cadence and blocker status per client
- Inline edits: ops lead could reassign work without leaving the dashboard
The key insight was that managers don’t need more data. They need fewer, better-chosen signals. We designed for decisions, not dashboards.
How we built it
Two months from research to handoff. Design was iterative: low-fi wireframes in week one, mid-fi prototypes in week two, weekly reviews with the ops lead through weeks three to eight. We were the design team; their internal devs built the production version off our spec.
The result
Monday morning ops review dropped from four hours of prep to fifteen minutes. The ops lead now walks into the meeting with the dashboard open instead of a printed spreadsheet.