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Saving Time with Smarter Project Oversight
Spartan Solar · 2024
Role
Design Lead
Skills
Product Design
Stakeholder Management
Prototyping
Timeline
Nov ‘24 - Dec ‘24
Team
2 Designers, 1 Engineer
Introduction
The project list was a key tool for managers to track solar sales progress. But as the company scaled, delays piled up—some projects were two years behind schedule with no easy way to identify risks early. Leadership wanted a Kanban dashboard, but that wouldn’t solve the real pain points.
My Role
I was responsible for making sure the proposed design handed to me met the needs of the PMs. This lead to me overhauling the platform to provide real-time insights, highlight project delays, and enable quick intervention, helping managers improve communication and efficiency.
This case study shows the simplest version of the final design. All stats and data are fictional for NDA purposes.
CEO
“We don’t know how many projects are outside SLA at each stage. By the time we know where a job is, it’s too late.”
The Challenge
4 interviews with project managers and upper management revealed that:
Managers lacked visibility into delayed projects.
PMs spent hours manually exporting and filtering data.
Leadership had no easy way to track company health.
How might we optimize the PM workflow to get back on track and minimize project losses?
Stakeholder’s Proposed Solution
Leadership wanted a dashboard with a Kanban board and project phase tables. However, it didn’t address PMs' daily workflow challenges or reduce inefficiencies.
Designing for Adoption & Execution
In order to push for my alternative solution, I worked closely with all teams involved:
• I worked with engineers to ensure technical feasibility.
• I prioritized manager usability while addressing leadership goals.
• I kept designs flexible for different PM workflows.
IMPACT
EFFORT
Low
High
High
SMS Messaging w/ HO
Project Tagging
All Projects Table View
All Projects Kanban View
Project Funnel Graph
Due to time and technical constraints, I helped brainstorm alternative solutions and prioritize the most important features.
Solution
The redesign solves for key pain points by providing:
Auto-Generated Reports to surface KPIs instantly
Interactive Graphs & Color-Coded Tags to quickly highlight bottlenecks and delays.
Advanced Filters & Saved Views to eliminate the need for PMs to manually export and filter project lists repeatedly.
Direct Access to Project Timelines, Details, and Chats allowing PMs to take immediate action.
Impact
⏳ Saved PMs hours per week by eliminating CSV exports.
🔍 Helped leadership identify and immediately resolve thousands of delayed projects more quickly.
🎯 Increased adoption by making the tool align with real PM workflows.
Here’s what the CTO had to say about me :)
Reflection
& Lessons Learned
This project pushed me to navigate conflicting stakeholder needs. Leadership wanted high-level insights, while PMs needed a tool that fit their daily workflow. Figuring out how to keep both happy without overcomplicating the design taught me a lot about flexibility and prioritization.
An unexpected challenge at the end was making sense of highly skewed project data. Some installers had 500 projects, while others had just 10, which made visualizing the data in a clear and scannable way tricky. Figuring out what stats were both technically feasible to calculate and actually useful to users also required deep collaboration with the engineers and PMs.