Pulse

People tracked the work. Nobody tracked the why. New person joins and can't catch up. Someone asks why something was built a certain way. Nobody can answer.

We talked to people across different industries. Everyone showed us their ticketing system. Nobody was tracking decisions.

So we set out to build the record.

We ran a design sprint. The goal: make the work itself the real-time truth of a company.

Five days later, we had a prototype:

The prototype organized work by structure. You could see that Deployment was at risk because UAT was blocked. Everything else was done. No one had to ask around. The structure was the record.

People liked the concept. But the hierarchy had no natural stopping point. What's a block, what's a sub-block, how far down does it go.

So we pivoted. Less about the structure of the work. More about the individual people doing it. Updates only. The work was already leaving a trail.

Pulse reads your Slack threads, Looms, PRs, board moves and drafts your weekly update. You read it, shape it, send. Up the chain, each level gets a draft built from the one below.

The record builds without anyone writing it from scratch.

We used it ourselves and showed it to teams outside our own. The value was in the rollup. Getting there meant getting your whole team in first. Nobody wanted to do that. That's what killed it.

It needed to work for one person before it could work for a team. The value traveled up. Nothing came back down. So we stopped.

I was the only designer on a team of three. Ran the sprint and testing, designed it end to end in Figma, worked closely with eng throughout, and ran demos.