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SUNBOUND · DESIGN SPRINT · 2024

Leading the design sprint from Slack chaos to a product strategy.

Operators managed payments through Slack threads, spreadsheets and manual tracking. I led a five-day design sprint with Sunbound’s executive team to define the first operator dashboard, and left with a clickable prototype instead of a backlog of ideas.

Role
Sprint lead and product designer
Partners
Executive team: product, operations, customer success
Format
Five-day design sprint
Timeline
Sunbound, 2024
Outcome
Operator dashboard MVP defined and prototyped
Design sprint overview

01

A north star before the sticky notes

The long-term goal: make managing money as easy as possible. The product north star: business office managers handle payments confidently and independently.

Sprint goals and north star

02

Days 1–2: mapping the journey

Team interviews and journey mapping surfaced three frictions, which became our How Might We statements:

  • No central view of resident balances
  • Payment issues tracked inconsistently
  • Bottlenecks at resident move-in
Journey mapping session
How Might We statements

03

Days 3–4: generating and testing ideas

An “art gallery” of concepts explored a unified dashboard, resident-level views, and flows for move-in payments and past-due follow-up. Impact-versus-effort mapping narrowed them to a focused MVP.

Concept gallery and impact-effort map

04

Day 5: storyboarding the MVP

We prototyped one critical workflow, a payment issue resolution dashboard that lets business office managers act without escalating to support, and storyboarded the chosen flows into screens ready for visual design and engineering.

MVP storyboard
Dashboard prototype

05

Turning fragments into a vision

The part I’m proudest of: taking scattered ideas and deep domain knowledge from around the table and turning them into a direction the whole executive team could rally behind.

Sprint synthesis
Final direction

06

Results

  • A long-term goal and product north star the team agreed on
  • A defined operator dashboard MVP
  • Alignment across product, operations and engineering
  • Ready-to-iterate flows and a testable clickable prototype

07

What I took from it

A sprint’s real output is agreement. The prototype mattered, but the bigger win was an executive team leaving with the same picture of what to build first.