Research

Dont Design. Just watch.

Every enterprise tool eventually reaches the same fork: iterate on what exists, or admit the thing needs to be rebuilt from its actual logic outward. NMC2 was already past that fork by the time I got involved — the question wasn't whether to redesign the interface, it was whether anyone actually understood the workflow the interface was supposed to represent.

They didn't. Not because the team was disorganized, but because the real system had never lived in software. It lived in one person.

The constraint I set for myself: don't touch the interface until I understand the job it's standing in for. Anything designed before that point wouldn't be a redesign of the workflow — it would just be a redesign of the screen, dressed up to look like progress. So before opening a single design file, I went to the source.

For three weeks, I sat beside River, the team's VP of Global Portfolio, while he ran "what-if" scenarios live — not just watching what he clicked, but what he was actually deciding, and the mental math happening in the seconds before he touched a cell. Alongside that, I ran six stakeholder interviews with the Head of Product, engineering, and adjacent teams to map where the underlying data actually originated and who depended on it downstream, then reviewed the Product Charter and the existing spreadsheets against a structured discovery interview I documented in Confluence — turning what had been tribal instinct into something a second person could actually reference.

What that process surfaced was consistent across every method: the same workflow, described the same way, by every person who touched it. Each new "what-if" scenario meant rebuilding logic that already existed — just never anywhere reusable — and by River's own estimate, a single scenario could take four to six hours to reconstruct by hand, entirely from memory of how the last one had been built. That workflow — the one leadership's actual portfolio decisions ran on — existed nowhere except inside River's head and his personal spreadsheet logic. That's not a tooling gap. That's a single point of failure sitting quietly under every decision the business made on top of it.

That reframed the entire brief. This wasn't "make the dashboard easier to use." It was: externalize a mental model that had never been designed, was never written down, and was actively load-bearing. Any solution that didn't start by making that model explicit — visible, shared, and reasoned-about by more than one person — would just be a better-looking version of the same fragility.

That's the problem Ideation had to solve.