Planning, better together

The situation

Planning lived in spreadsheets. They were powerful for the one person who built the model and opaque to everyone who had to trust it. The people who owned the decisions were locked out of the work that shaped them, and comparing two ways forward meant emailing files around and hoping the numbers still lined up.

What I did

I led design for the product from concept forward, working as the senior designer on the product team. I set the visual direction, designed the core modeling flows, and specced them for engineering. The harder problem was making a spreadsheet's power legible: keeping everything a modeler could do while showing the rest of the team what was going on.

The model was never the hard part. Letting a whole team see it, and build on it together, was.

So I designed for comparison and collaboration: scenarios you could build side by side, changes you could follow, and a shared view that brought decision-makers into the planning instead of leaving them at the summary.

What shipped

Visual modeling tools and side-by-side scenario comparison, designed and specced for build. The product kept the depth planners needed and made the work readable to the people who acted on it.

What it enabled

Teams could build and experiment with scenarios together, and the people responsible for the decisions could finally see and shape the work behind them. Planning moved out of one person's file and into a room everyone could stand in.