Overview
A SaaS platform built for businesses in the building and refurbishing space — the contractors, crews, and project managers who run home service operations day to day. The product brings their fragmented workflow into one place: setting up the business, managing crews and projects, tracking time, generating estimates, and converting that work into invoices without the usual back-and-forth.
My role
Product Designer, working in a team of three designers alongside the head of development. I owned the service provider side of the product — the experience used by company managers, support teams, and field crews — from research through to high-fidelity design and handoff.
The challenge
Home service businesses run on workflows that are genuinely complex — recurring jobs, fluctuating crew availability, multi-line estimates that evolve into invoices, hours logged across multiple sites. Most operators manage all of this across spreadsheets, paper, and disconnected tools.
The real question I had to answer: How do you bring serious operational complexity into a single platform without making it feel like enterprise software — so a project manager can run their day from it, and a crew member can use it from a phone on a job site?
Discovery
Stakeholder kickoff
We started with a working session between the three designers, head of development, and two client-side stakeholders. The goal was to understand the value proposition, the customer base the clients already knew well, and to set shared team goals for the project.
Affinity mapping
Back with the design and development team, we ran an affinity mapping session in FigJam to organize everything we'd heard — clustering insights by user role and by product area. This gave us a clear map of who we were designing for and where the real complexity sat.
Design objectives
From the mapping, I drafted design objectives for the service provider side and reviewed them with the team. Five priorities emerged: a clean profile setup, a crew management tool, a catalog for services and products, time tracking, and an invoicing flow tied to work actually delivered.
Competitor analysis
With objectives in place, I ran a competitor study to see how similar platforms handled these problems. I organized the findings into a structured list and used it as the basis for a working session with the client to define what made the MVP cut.
Problems I set out to solve
- Complex operations that needed to feel simple. The workflows are inherently complicated — the interface couldn't be.
- A team with very different user types. Project managers, support staff, and field crews use the platform differently and need different things from it.
- A disconnected estimate → job → invoice flow. In most tools, these are three separate processes. They shouldn't be.
- Scheduling that mirrors reality. Recurring jobs, blocked hours, crew availability — all needed to be handled without making managers fight the system.
- A visual language that signals trust, not noise. This is a tool people use for hours a day to run their livelihood. It needed to feel calm and professional.
Design approach
After defining the style direction, I moved into high-fidelity design feature by feature. We ran weekly client reviews where I presented progress, gathered feedback, and iterated — typically through about three rounds per feature before it landed in a state everyone was confident in.
Key design decisions
A calm visual language, against initial instinct
The client's first instinct was a bright, attention-grabbing palette. I pushed back and proposed a calmer direction — softer colors, restrained typography, lots of breathing room — because this is a tool people would live in for hours, not a marketing surface that needs to grab them. The client agreed, and the calmer palette became the foundation.
Two style directions, one decisive choice
Rather than presenting one option and hoping for approval, I designed two distinct style directions and built both on a dashboard layout — the dashboard shows fragments of multiple sections, so the client could see how each style would feel across the whole product before committing. It made the decision faster and more confident.
A single thread from estimate to invoice
The most meaningful design work was on the estimate-to-job-to-invoice flow. Instead of treating these as three separate tools, I designed them as one continuous workflow — an estimate becomes a job with a click, and a completed job becomes an invoice with the work already itemized. This is the system the client now treats as a core differentiator.
Crew management built around real schedules
I designed the crew tools around how these teams actually operate — managers can mark availability, block non-working hours, and schedule recurring jobs with specific dates and times, rather than fighting a calendar built for office workers.
Timesheets that work for both sides
Crew members log hours and view their own timesheets in a simple, mobile-friendly view. Managers see those records in an aggregated view where they can review and approve. Same underlying data, two interfaces tuned for two very different jobs.
Integrated chat to keep work in one place
Communication between staff and clients lives inside the platform rather than scattered across SMS and email, so the context around a job stays attached to the job itself.
What shipped
- Service provider profile and business setup
- Project creation and tracking with pre-configured estimates including materials and services
- Crew management with availability, scheduling, and recurring jobs
- Time tracking with crew-facing timesheets and manager approval flow
- Integrated platform chat for clients and staff
- Estimate → job → invoice conversion as a connected workflow
- Services and products catalog
What I took away from this project
The biggest lesson was about the trade-off between simplicity and complexity. In a product like this, you can't always make things simple — what you can do is make complex things intuitive. That distinction shaped how I approached every feature. I also leveled up significantly on dense operational design — recurring schedules, timesheet hierarchies, multi-stage workflows — the kind of problems that don't fit neatly on a single screen. And working in a team of designers, with weekly stakeholder reviews, sharpened how I present work, defend decisions, and translate feedback into iterations that actually move the design forward.