Challenge

Too many tools, too much time

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

Reporting on design work is the least fun part of a manager's week, but at a company the size of AXS, cross-team visibility matters. In a designer's week, one project pauses, another gets blocked, and a third comes out of user research with a core assumption upended. Jira and similar tools skip that middle, and do a thousand things we don't need.

So we juggled a spreadsheet shared with product, a Slack kanban board with no memory of last week, and a standing meeting or email to keep product peers in the loop. Ops also collected monthly work allocations from every team for financial reporting.

A good tool probably exists somewhere, but approval 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

My first prototype was for designers and got pushback, so I rebuilt it for managers to use in the weekly standup.

Using Cursor, the same tool I build personal apps with, I made a prototype in a few hours: designers hit Go, Pause, Blocked, or Done, and statuses rolled up into a report for managers.

I demoed it in our Leads meeting expecting pushback, and got it. Designers said they'd forget to update it and their days were too fluid. 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 my managers' feedback as I went.

Results

One standup. Better visibility.

12 hrsto build the tool
3→1tools consolidated

Reporting now happens in one weekly standup, and ops pulls numbers straight from the tool.

Anyone in the company can open the tool, so visibility improved, and our operations lead no longer chases people down for her numbers.