Progress
Where am I, and what is complete?
Enterprise Planning /
Enterprise Planning /Enterprise Planning /- Role:
- Solo Senior Product Designer
- Scope:
- Problem framing → Interaction design → Rule system.
- Timeline:
- 6 months
- Context:
- Suez × Board
How a homepage redesign became a coordination system for finance teams, and a reusable foundation for the work that followed.
Annual budget coordinated€1.2B24 regions · 186 agencies · one dependency chain
01
The diagnosisThe brief described a UI problem.
The brief described a UI problem.
The work exposed a coordination problem.
Every calculation existed. Every approval existed. Every workflow existed.
And yet the finance teams responsible for keeping the cycle moving still coordinated it through email. One task stalled upstream held twenty-four regional leads downstream. The only mechanism for detecting that stall was somebody asking.
The data was all there.
What was missing was any way to act on it.
A menu, not a coordination tool.
Evidence 01 / Existing experience
Everything was available. Nothing was prioritised.
First attempt
My first answer was the one they asked for.
First approach
The brief said make it more visual, show the workflow. So I mapped the whole budget process into a single visual flow — every phase, every step, in sequence.
But it showed where the stops were. It could not show you where your train was. A user could trace the process end to end and still not answer: where am I right now, and what is waiting on me?
The problem was never that the process was hard to see. A user’s own state inside it was invisible.
This was not a UI problem.
It was a workflow architecture problem.
BriefImprove consistency and navigation.
InsightUI inconsistency was a symptom.
ChallengeMake workflow state visible.
Four questions the
system never answered.
Users held the operating model in memory. Mapping made the gap concrete.
Ownership
Who approves this? Who owns next?
Dependencies
What is blocking me?
Next steps
What should I do now?
02
The system
Rules first. Screens second.
- 01Visibility before navigation.
- 02Context must survive execution.
- 03Dependencies are product.
- 04Workflow state is never optional.
- 05Actionable before informational.
- 06Roles coordinate. Interfaces should too.
Primary craft evidenceThe coordination layer
The coordination layer
that was missing.
The persistent status bar survives every screen — the coordination layer that was missing.
What shaped the new workflow experience01 02 03
Persistent workflow status
A coordination layer follows the user through the entire process.
Priorities ordered by consequence, not time
The system surfaces the work with the greatest downstream impact.
Dependencies as first-class objects
Every blockage reveals its owner, consequence and recovery path.
The senior decision is often the thing you choose not to ship.
Status inside existing screens
The state would disappear as users moved through the workflow.
A breadcrumb instead of dependencies
It explained location, but not what was blocked or who owned the next move.
A configurable dashboard
Required coordination would become optional. I traded flexibility for a guarantee.
Roles testedThey read the state
3 rolesThey read the state
off the screen —
without prompting.
I turned three local perspectives into one operating model.
National Finance, regional controllers and agency users walked through the same dependency chain. Each role could identify current state, owner and next action without explanation.
03
From product to systemThe most durable
The most durable
output wasn’t a screen.
The rule library connected workflow principles, screen behaviour and acceptance criteria — giving future projects proven patterns instead of a blank page.
AI as a consumer of the system
The 24 rules became more valuable than the screens they produced.
Once decisions were expressed as roles, states, dependencies and exceptions, they could constrain AI-assisted exploration instead of relying on prompts alone. I later applied the same principle in TAP Mindset: stable rules provide the context that makes generated work reviewable, repeatable and safer to ship.
See how this principle evolved in TAP Design System ↗
Tested in the context of the real workflow.
Three roles tested the same hand-off, dependency and exception scenarios.
55+ limitations were documented as constraints, not presented as outcomes.
People don’t coordinate work through screens.
They coordinate through shared understanding.
The product’s job is to make that understanding visible.
More Works©MMore Works©M