Strategic Planning & Consensus Suite
Architecting a "One State" Financial Sandbox for a Multi-Billion Dollar Retail Ecosystem
NDA Notice: This project was completed under a non-disclosure agreement. All names have been removed and data sanitized; however, the core architectural challenges and logic remain intact.
Executive Summary
The Problem
A "Broken Handshake" between teams trapped in offline silos, dangerously compressing the leadership strategic decision window.
The Solution
An end-to-end workflow and "Scenario Sandbox" that replaced manual reconciliation with system-driven audit trails.
Key Outcome
Established the organization's first unified version history; slashed rework cycles by stabilizing the data foundation.
My Role & Team
Role: Lead Product Designer
Scope: System architecture, UX, data modeling, validation logic
Team: Product, Engineering, Finance, Commercial Ops
Platform Type: Enterprise financial planning system
Platform Overview
What is this suite?
It’s a Scenario Sandbox where the organization bridges Sales promo intent with Financial reality. Our platform serves finance teams by supporting two primary roles: creators who build financial scenarios and validators who ensure their accuracy.
The Business Mandate
For years, the organization relied on a chaotic web of Excel sheets and emails, creating siloed teams and constant rework. Our mandate was to move to a "One State": a shared, scalable system with built-in guardrails and a traceable version history.
Discovery — Identifying the "Broken Handshake"
I synthesized 20+ interviews and workflow walkthroughs to move past "feature requests" and identify the structural barriers to collaboration.
The Root Cause: Data Sovereignty vs. Agility
Strict security policies prohibited public cloud tools, forcing teams into "Offline Silos." Creators and Validators were stuck manually reconciling local spreadsheets via email.
The Business Impact
The Rework Loop: Manual reconciliation pushed alignment past the deadline.
Compressed Decisions: Delays dangerously narrowed the window for leadership’s strategic choices.
The Mission: Reclaim time by building a secure "Scenario Sandbox" for real-time collaboration without compromising data integrity.
The Strategy: Architecting the Handshake
To solve the problem, I mapped the User Journey to visualize how collaboration functions within a unified system, and identified the key phases driving the workflow.
The Strategic Choice
With these friction points identified, I collaborated with my PM on a Three-Phase Roadmap.
This case study deep-dives into Milestone 1: establishing the platform's core modeling foundation.
Architecting the Solution - From Flow to Feature
From the journey map, I defined four core functional areas designed to address the specific goals of each workflow segment.
To ensure the design wasn’t a “lift-and-shift” of Excel templates. I mapped the data schema and system hierarchy from scratch — defining a structured, relational data model where data rolled up correctly at every level.
Execution: "Density is a Feature"
In expert-user environments, "simplicity" can be a liability. I leaned into Expert Density, using logic to manage cognitive load rather than stripping away data.
The Price Impact Workspace (The Core Engine)
The Conflict: Creators need daily-level details for modeling; Validators need weekly rollups for verification.
The Solution: Progressive Disclosure. I highlighted weekly forecasts for both personas while tucking daily details and "DG Deltas" into secondary and tertiary layers.
Data Integrity: The Promo Card Schema
Upstream systems prioritize flexibility, which often results in fragmented data. I designed a Standardized Promo Card Schema to unify this data into a single header, allowing Creators to decide in seconds if a promo is worth modeling.
Validation: The Logic Pivot
To truly stress-test the system, I worked with Engineering to build a functional prototype with real data. Observing users handle actual tasks led to two critical senior-level pivots:
The Forecast Selector: We moved this from the Scenario level to the Plan level. This forced all scenarios to use the same forecast version, eliminating manual cross-checking.
Date Anchors: Instead of over-engineering an event system, I integrated "Date Ranges" into headers. This simple anchor provided essential holiday context and increased user confidence without adding system bloat.
Beyond Pixels: Logic & Post-Launch Governance
As Lead Designer, my responsibility didn't end with the mockup. I drafted the initial design and technical specs -- including validation and calculation rules -- then worked closely with the PM, engineers, and QAs to refine them. I also aligned with the PM on key topics for the post-mortem, and drafted the qualitative and quantitative follow-up plans. To support the tracking, I worked with engineering to ensure all tracking events were correctly labeled, and vibe-coded a tracking dashboard to help analyze the data firsthand.
Post-Launch: Data-Driven Iteration
Tracking data revealed that users were batch-adding promos in highly condensed timeframes — a pattern invisible in prototype testing. Follow-up interviews confirmed: when building a base scenario, they want to pull in all sales-planned promos at once.
Improvement shipped: Added an “Add All Filtered Promos” button — allowing users to import the full promo plan from the sales platform in a single action.
A second insight from flow path analysis: high “Expand” engagement but low “Collapse” engagement on promo bands — signaling users wanted persistent expanded states, not a toggle. This informed a follow-up UX update to the band interaction model.
Outcomes: Speaking the Same Language
Thoughts
“This project proved that complexity is solved by logic, not just layouts.”
The hardest design work here wasn’t the UI — it was understanding the data model deeply enough to make the right structural decisions, and having the conviction to push for pivots when prototype testing revealed the assumptions were wrong.