Nick BlakeProduct Designer
Skylight leadership needed better visibility into employee utilization across projects. I designed an automated dashboard that pulled time data from T-Sheets, reducing utilization reporting from hours to minutes and helping managers maximize billable hours in real-time. This increased billable hour capture by 12%, generating $240k in additional revenue.
Leadership tracked utilization in spreadsheets, manually pulling data from T-Sheets each week. The process was error-prone, time-consuming, and made it difficult to identify trends or act on data quickly.
Company policy around PTO and utilization evolved throughout the project. I created documentation to guide employees and leadership on how calculations worked, what the utilization thresholds meant, and when exceptions applied. This ensured the tool remained aligned with policy changes over time.
The dashboard served three distinct user roles. This role-based structure ensured each user saw only relevant information.
- Individual contributors could view their own utilization
- Managers could track their direct reports
- Executives could modify targets and view org-wide data.
Early explorations of the individual contributor view focused on surfacing the most critical information at a glance: current utilization status, time off balance, and recent activity. Sketches helped us test different layouts quickly and identify which metrics mattered most to users checking their own data.
Color-coded utilization bars gave users immediate feedback on their billable hours. The three-zone system (blue for over-utilized, green for on-target, orange for warning) helped them quickly understand their status without parsing numbers.
Building an internal tool showed me how constraints like limited engineering time, shifting company policy, and users with different comfort levels pushed me to make strategic design decisions. I had to balance what executives needed to control with what employees needed to understand, while designing something flexible enough to evolve with the business.