Role:
Solo Senior Product Designer
Scope:
Problem framing → Interaction design → Rule system.
Timeline:
6 months
Context:
Suez x Board
Annual budget coordinated
24 regions · 186 agencies · one dependency chain
The diagnosis
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.
Everything was available. Nothing was prioritised.
FIRST ATTEMPT
FIRST APPROACH
The brief said make it more visual, show the workflow. So I did. I mapped the whole budget process into a single visual flow — every phase, every step, in sequence. It was clearer than what they had.
When I walked the flow through with the people responsible for the process, the same gap kept surfacing. It showed where the stops were, but not where each user was. They could trace the process end to end and still struggled to answer the questions that mattered in the moment: where am I right now, and what is waiting on me?
The problem was never that the process was hard to see. It was that a user’s own state inside it was invisible. That reframed everything.
The reframe
Brief
Improve consistency and navigation.
Insight
UI inconsistency was a symptom.
Challenge
Make workflow state visible.
Users held the operating model in memory. Mapping made the gap concrete.
Progress
Where am I, and what is complete?
Ownership
Who approves this? Who owns next?
Dependencies
What is blocking me?
Next steps
What should I do now?
The system
01
Visibility before navigation.
02
Context must survive execution.
03
Dependencies are product.
04
Workflow state is never optional.
05
Actionable before informational.
06
Roles coordinate. Interfaces should too.
Primary craft evidence
redesigned workflow
What shaped the new workflow experience
Persistent workflow status
A coordination layer you can dismiss is one nobody sees. It stays at the top of every screen.
Priorities ordered by consequence, not date
Urgency in a dependency chain is not proximity in a calendar. We ranked by downstream consequence.
Dependencies as a first-class column
Showing what work unlocks turns ownership from an item to tick into a position in a chain.
What I considered and didn’t build
Rejected
Status inside existing screens
Faster and cheaper, but it distributed state across screens instead of showing the whole cycle.
Rejected
A breadcrumb instead of dependencies
It answered where am I, but not what am I blocking — the question that changed behaviour.
Rejected
A configurable dashboard
Requested by stakeholders, but configurability would make workflow state optional. I traded flexibility for a guarantee.
Roles tested
National Finance Leads, Regional Controllers and Finance PMO could identify stage, blockers, next steps and complete a task without losing workflow context.
From product to system
Design rules
Platform limits
Reusable patterns
The rule library connected workflow principles, screen behaviour and acceptance criteria. Once structured, it could become context for AI-assisted design: future projects start from proven patterns instead of a blank page.
Validation
Role-based walkthroughs
Three role-based walkthroughs used real responsibilities and scenarios from the budgeting cycle. Observing where participants hesitated helped refine the labels, information hierarchy and decision rules before adoption.
A platform ceiling.
55+ known front-end limitations shaped what was buildable. Documenting them stopped the team rediscovering the same constraints.
What this was actually about
Adopted by SUEZ for the FY2026 budgeting cycle
