P2 Sphere: Comcast's construction finance platform

Leadership recognized that P2 had stalled. Adoption hadn't grown beyond the people required to use it, satisfaction scores were flat, and costs rose with each new feature.

My interview included a walkthrough of the platform from a first-time user's perspective, identifying where it was hard to use. Once I joined, the goal was to make P2 a tool people would choose to use.

A team of Salesforce developers had built P2 after an earlier version fell short, with the priority on getting core processes working. User experience hadn't yet been a focus.

• Errors that were easy to make and costly to fix. Similar-looking jobs in separate browser tabs made it easy to enter data in the wrong place. Change orders then had to be recalled and resubmitted, and managers sometimes acted on outdated versions.
• Rising costs. Each new feature required more Salesforce development, and each new user required another license.
• Low confidence in the data. Many teams kept their own spreadsheets, and one division had funded a separate app of its own.

We started small, built confidence, and then brought existing tools into Sphere one at a time, each rebuilt as a feature sharing a common design language, navigation, and vocabulary. I came to call these feature-wares.

• Research through every available channel. When direct access to end users was limited, I learned from the developers and from each division's data leads. Later, I conducted 5–10 observation sessions and interviews for each of about 15 features.
• P2 Lite first. A read-only job tracker for people who needed visibility without entering data. It reached 8,000 users and became the foundation for Sphere.
• A sustainable foundation. I recommended moving from Angular to React with Material UI, and leadership agreed to make the change three months into the build.
• A shared system. A token-based design system used across three applications, and a unified brand across the network products.

The division that had built its own app became one of Sphere's strongest adopters, and the finance team proposed, adopted, and advocated for Planning's AI forecasts.

• P2 Trax. A mobile app for finance executives that didn't gain enough stakeholder support. After three months of prototyping, the project was set aside.
• Permitting's first release. Without direct access to the divisions during design, the first release didn't meet users' needs, and satisfaction dropped.
• Network Connections. A full application brought in as a single feature, with too few voices shaping it.

Our products struggled when design was distant from the people using them, and improved when that distance closed. Access to users is essential, and when it's limited, it's worth finding other ways to understand their work.