Dependency & Milestone Management
Product Designer, Discovery, Design, and Delivery
Note: This project was built for a government platform. Due to its classification, I'm unable to show visuals or name the specific program. The details below reflect the process and design thinking, not the interface itself.
Challenge
A stakeholder overseeing coordination for a large, multi-year organizational transformation initiative needed a better way to manage dozens of interdependent events and milestones. Many events were sequentially dependent — when one shifted, everything downstream had to shift with it — but the team was tracking this manually in Excel.
There was no reliable way to distinguish milestone-level events from routine ones, and a single date change could trigger a cascade of manual updates across the sheet, with high risk of something being missed. The stakeholder identified an existing long-range planning application as the natural home for this capability, but dependency management didn't exist in the product yet.
My team was brought in to design and build it from scratch, with a four-month timeline to deliver. As the product designer, I owned translating this ambiguous, high-stakes scheduling problem into a usable interface for planners who were already stretched thin.
Approach
Discovery & Research
I started by interviewing the users managing this process to understand their current workflow, capturing findings and artifacts in FigJam. Interview questions were structured around two goals: surfacing what we didn't yet know about the workflow, and validating assumptions the team had already made about how planners worked.
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
In parallel, I ran a comparative analysis of tools solving similar problems — looking at Asana, Excel, and Microsoft Project — to understand existing patterns for dependency management and milestone visualization before designing our own approach.
Technical Constraints
The long-range planning application was built on Mobiscroll, so I reviewed its design system early, and our developers spiked on Mobiscroll's technical constraints in parallel to understand what was feasible to build within the four-month timeline. This ran alongside design so we weren't designing something the platform couldn't support.
Ideation & Feasibility
I led workshops with the team to ideate on how to solve for the core asks, working through options in Figma while weighing feasibility against what the Mobiscroll constraints and dev spike had surfaced.
Solutions
Our team worked in an Agile process, building and delivering the first iteration to users and stakeholders through remote demos over Microsoft Teams. Our team was centrally located while users and stakeholders were based on the East Coast, so async and remote feedback loops were core to how we worked.
The first iteration let users link related events directly within the application. In testing, feedback surfaced a real usability conflict: the interaction pattern we'd chosen obstructed the user's view of their own calendar, making it hard to maintain context while making changes.
Being agile, we treated this as a design problem to solve rather than a fixed decision. I redesigned the interaction to preserve calendar visibility throughout the linking process and added the ability to distinguish and lock milestone events from routine ones. The revised version tested significantly better with users and directly addressed the context-loss issue from the first round.
Impact
The long-range planning application had over 16,000 users across multiple organizations at the time. The dependency-linking feature we built was adopted broadly across those organizations, with usage data showing 82% of users engaging with the feature — a strong adoption signal for a capability that didn't exist four months earlier.
Following this project, I went on to design and build a tutorial/onboarding capability within the application, addressing a gap that had grown over the platform's three-plus years of releases: many features had shipped without corresponding documentation or release notes, leaving users to discover functionality on their own. I led the design of a solution to close that gap for the broader user base.
