Solving the annual $240k Excel Trap
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
3 months (2024-2025)
Design Team
Product Designer
Design Manager
Skills
Product Design
Product Strategy
Research
Prototyping
Stakeholder presentation
tldr;
Aire Labs is targeting ClimateTech companies, where tools like Excel fall short for multi-faceted decision making.
The Problem
Financial planners at climate tech companies often spend up to 15 hrs/week on data issues and inefficiencies in Excel. This results in errors and a lack of confidence, causing businesses to lose up to $240k annually in productivity.
The Research
User interviews and secondary research revealed that financial planners spend significant time validating and duplicating excel sheets for sensitivity analysis, hindering their ability to focus on critical tasks.
The Solution
Collaborating with the team, I designed a 0 to 1 application, focusing on speeding up and automating functionality, enhancing collaborative features, and enabling quick scenario planning.
Enterprise companies signed up for beta testing
Reduction in time on tasks from ~2 hours to ~1 hour 20 minutes in preliminary testing.
Engineering acceptance rate, resulting in a faster development cycle
Problem
Financial planners struggle with dynamic planning using Excel
Imagine managing complex financial planning with outdated Excel sheets and scattered tools—juggling numbers, wrestling with clunky visuals, and fearing errors that could derail critical decisions.
As one analyst confessed during market research: "I spend about 15 hours a week just validating Excel files instead of actually working on stuff I need to." This wasn't just inefficiency—it was financial planners fighting spreadsheets instead of supporting the company's goals.
An example of the economic analyses that project managers were doing over Excel
These inefficiencies led to problems within the workflows and up to $240K annually in lost time to businesses
Inaccuracy in data
Manually tracking data in Excel is error-prone
Changing project requirements
Poor Scenario Analysis
Difficult to customize and report for each scenario
Hard to keep track of duplicates
Inefficient collaboration
No easy way to retrieve and search old audits
Lost feedback between mails
Final designs addressing changing project requirements
Modular dashboard that allows users to change data sources and visualizations
I designed a modular dashboard that bridged changing requirements such as government policies, free markets and capital changes turning complex data into clear, interactive visuals, allowing project managers to present financial models without losing their audience.
Final designs addressing poor scenario analyses
An efficient and simple sandbox for financial analysis, allowing quick edits and exports
Teams could now explore scenarios with ease. Want to see the impact of a 20% drop in material costs? Click. Send alternate models to investors and stakeholders? Click, click. No more duplicated spreadsheets.
Final designs addressing lack of collaborative tools
Versioning and robust sharing tools to end email chaos
Inspired by tools like Atlassian and Github, I prioritized page-level sharing and robust version control, ending the chaos of endless email chains and conflicting file versions for stakeholders and investors.
So how did
we get there?
I believe every project has something for me to learn and no design process is set in stone! This project in particular, cut both ways and required me to fail often and learn quickly.
Process
Research insights pointed to workflow complexities
Startups move fast—tight timelines, limited resources. With just three months for an MVP, I put together 2 week sprints, starting with 7 user interviews with individuals and professionals of different levels and backgrounds.
"Planning takes too much time"
Excel lacked the tools needed for robust sensitivity analyses required by project managers, who had limited time and resources for personalized attention.
expressed a level of frustration in regards to lack of standardization
"I can’t keep track of my work"
Project managers across the board pointed out how using Excel as the primary tool meant switching between different tools for tasks like analyzing, reporting, and sharing.
found it frustrating to switch between apps to see their workload.
" Where I start is never where I end up"
The ad-hoc nature of ClimateTech meant that things like government policies affected the company's metrics. Every new change meant duplicated and redundant spreadsheets.
Were unsure of the how many obsolete versions of their document existed
Now that user needs are identified, what even goes inside an analysis?
Designing enterprise solutions with a non-financial background, I had to rapidly learn concepts required to understand these complex workflows. "You'll be drinking from the firehose," the CEO said as I began countless Google searches and extensive reading of articles and research papers
The initial strategy meeting focused on understanding users, stakeholders, and their familiar workflows to define product features. This aligned the team, uncovered potential issues early, and made the ideation process feel smooth and manageable.
The product analysis helped us refine the design by building on current feature iterations found in competitors while saving precious time ideating.
Aligning product strategy to prioritize features and product roadmaps
Identifying table stakes and differentiators
With the clock ticking, we needed to be strategic about what we built first. I worked with the team to put together a design document that detailed features and roadmaps, helping define the scope.
This Coda document was crucial in preventing scope creep and helped establish manageable modules to meet the deadline.
Some pushback to embrace the startup mindset
During feature ideation sprints, I initially held back, self-editing ideas to fit constraints—a habit from my technical background. But the team encouraged open exploration, prioritizing rapid creation, testing, and iteration. This shift aligned perfectly with the startup’s ethos and pushed me to embrace a more experimental approach.
Learning
Putting all the pieces together
Using the established information architecture and visual hierarchy, I rapidly created and refined wireframes to achieve the visual fidelity needed for developers to begin implementation and for user testing to validate our direction.
Following the F-Pattern due to primarily western user base, I created simple visual guidelines to inform wireframes
An example of the iteration process for data visualization dashboards across sprints
Outcomes
Building efficient tools where just the 'default' doesn't work
As my contract ended, I checked in with the team. They were already documenting improvements for future iterations while developers built on our foundational designs. An awesome experience with a promising team.
Something I'd do differently…
