Realigning the Timesheets Experience

The Challenge

When I joined the team, a new Timesheets feature had just been released to a segment of customers and the feedback was overwhelmingly negative. Out of 5 stars, the average rating was just 1.2.

I immediately followed up with users who had given the feature 3 stars or below. Through a series of quick interviews, I gathered insights about the main pain points and frustrations. It was clear that users were confused, the value wasn’t clear, and the feature wasn’t delivering on expectations.

Uncovering the Root Cause

To better understand how the feature ended up in this state, I reviewed the project’s history. There had been solid strategic thinking and promising early concepts, but somewhere along the way, the direction had pivoted.

I ran a UX audit of the current experience and worked closely with the Customer Support team, PM, tech lead, and Head of Product to map out what changed and why. Through stakeholder interviews and workshops, we identified a key blocker: deep technical debt that had not been accounted for early in the process, which led to several compromises in the feature’s final implementation.

Aligning Around a New Vision

To get the team moving forward again, I facilitated a series of workshops and co-creation sessions. Based on those conversations and user feedback, I created a vision and strategy document outlining:

• The current state of the Timesheets experience
• User pain points and business impact
• A realistic improvement plan
• Measurable outcomes for each phase
• A north star experience to work toward

This vision document became a shared source of truth across design, product, and engineering. It helped us realign around a common goal and provided clarity on what success looked like.

Small Wins, Real Impact

While setting the vision, I also collaborated with the team to implement a few quick UX improvements based directly on user feedback. These small but meaningful changes led to a rating increase from 1.2 to 2.4 within a month – a clear sign that we were on the right track.

Outcome