Challenge

Too many tools, too much time

Jira tracks start and end dates — not the messy middle of a designer's week. And nothing we already had solved the week-by-week status problem.

Reporting on a designer's work is the least fun part of a design manager's week, but at a company the size of AXS, cross-team visibility matters. Jira and other project management tools track a start and end date, but leave out the messy middle—the fun exploratory part—and they do a thousand things we don't need. This is a designer's week: One project pauses, another gets blocked, a third just came out of user research that upended a core assumption. It's messy by nature.

To manage that process, we were juggling a spreadsheet shared with product for start and target end dates, a Slack kanban board with no memory of last week's status, and a standing meeting or email to keep product peers in the loop. On top of that, an ops team collected monthly work allocations across every team for financial reporting.

Too many tools, too much time. And nothing the company already had licenses for solved the week-by-week status problem. A good tool probably exists somewhere, but getting it approved takes weeks, and the cost is hard to justify for a problem this specific.

Solution

Built in Cursor, shaped by manager feedback

AXS custom project management tool — screen 1

A designer-facing prototype got pushback — so I rebuilt a manager-facing tool that folded into the weekly standup.

I turned to Cursor, the same tool I use to build personal apps at home, and built a prototype in a few hours: designers hit Go, Pause, Blocked or Done on their projects, and that status rolled up into a report for managers.

I demoed it in our Leads meeting, expecting some pushback, and got it. The designers said they'd forget to update statuses, and that their days were too fluid for a tool like that. Fair, and I could relate. But everyone agreed a manager-facing version could fold into an existing weekly standup without adding overhead.

So I started over, and built a more traditional project management tool in about 12 hours, shaping it with feedback from my managers as I went.

Results

One standup. Better visibility.

12 hrsto build the tool
3→1tools consolidated

Reporting folded into one weekly standup — and ops pulls numbers directly from the tool.

Reporting overhead is now contained to a single weekly standup. Visibility improved because anyone in the company can access the tool, and our operations lead now pulls her numbers directly from it instead of chasing people down.