TeamGantt
A PM tool for people who hate project management, loved by 1M+ users.
TeamGantt
A PM tool for people who hate project management, loved by 1M+ users.
TeamGantt
A PM tool for people who hate project management, loved by 1M+ users.
(SaaS) Project Management
Overview
TeamGantt is a project management platform used by over one million remote teams and SMBs. I joined as the founding Head of UX & Design Systems to transform a WordPress-built MVP into a scalable SaaS product. My work focused on building systems, not screens — creating a UX foundation that could support $8M in ARR and sustainable growth.
Vision & Context
The founders built TeamGantt to simplify complex project planning for non-PMs. The goal wasn’t to reinvent Gantt charts—it was to make them human. The challenge: scaling that clarity without losing simplicity.
Understanding the Problem
When I joined, the product's success had outgrown its structure. Design was inconsistent, with engineering duplicating work. The onboarding flow that worked for 1,000 users collapsed under the weight of 100,000. For instance, new users like Claire, a project manager implementing TeamGantt for her distributed team, often found themselves confused and frustrated when they couldn't easily locate key features. Her initial excitement quickly turned into impatience as she struggled to interpret the overloaded interface, leading her to question if TeamGantt could meet her team's needs.
I approached it like a systems problem — not “what do we redesign?” but “why are these friction points happening?”
I started by mapping the bottlenecks between design and development:
• Where were engineers rebuilding components that already existed?
• Why were customers churning after sign-up?
• What was the hidden cost of design debt?
Early data analysis and customer feedback showed that onboarding confusion and slow task workflows were the top churn drivers. At the time, the churn rate was as high as 12%. Implementing targeted UX improvements, grounded by these insights, led to a significant decrease, reducing the churn rate to 4%. These insights grounded every subsequent UX decision.
Vision & Context
The founders built TeamGantt to simplify complex project planning for non-PMs. The goal wasn’t to reinvent Gantt charts—it was to make them human. The challenge: scaling that clarity without losing simplicity.
Strategic Approach
My first principle: structure scales, aesthetics don't. I built the initial design system to solve two problems at once: consistency for users and efficiency for developers. Instead of a static UI kit, I created a living framework tied directly to product patterns and engineering logic. The structure was based on atomic design principles, where elements consist of "Button → Toolbar → Scheduler" trios. This hierarchy of atoms, molecules, and organisms offers a clear visualization of the system, making design both functional and intuitive.
Design thinking guided the system architecture:
Define clarity: Simplify task hierarchies and remove unnecessary choices.
Design for iteration: Ensure components evolve without breaking dependencies.
Prove value early: Track reuse, velocity, and performance from day one.
Close the feedback loop: Align validation with engineering sprints.
As adoption grew, the system became a shared language between design, product, and code, providing measurable proof that alignment saves time. One of the key rituals we established was the "Tuesday Validation Standup," where team members from each department collaborated to review in-progress designs. This meeting directly improved the time to market by reducing feedback loops, ultimately contributing to a 10% faster feature delivery.
System Architecture Thinking
The system was designed like infrastructure. Every component was data-driven, versioned, and reusable across contexts. The design system became both blueprint and benchmark—bridging product, marketing, and engineering.
Key Initiatives
When rebuilding the core UX for task planning and scheduling, we treated it as a lean experiment. Our hypothesis was: If we reduce the number of steps in the task planning process, user activation would increase by 15%. This approach was informed and refined through extensive usage analytics and direct user interviews, ensuring that every change was evidence-based and aligned with user needs.
Migrated the marketing site to Webflow for speed and conversion testing.
Designed modular components to standardize onboarding and reduce support requests.
Introduced UX performance dashboards tracking velocity, reuse, and adoption metrics.
Established pre-dev validation cycles to prevent rework and improve collaboration.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Alignment across teams became a core UX discipline. Design rituals integrated directly into sprint cycles, ensuring validation before build. Product reviews evolved into performance reviews for the system itself.
Financial Impact & Business Enablement
Beyond efficiency, design drove measurable business outcomes. Reduced rework cut annual costs by $150K+, while velocity gains opened bandwidth for new features that directly fueled ARR growth.
Key Results
ARR Growth: $1.7M → $8M (2016–2023)
User Growth: +140% globally
Conversion Lift: +20% through performance and flow optimization
Dev Efficiency: 65% faster delivery from reusable systems
Revenue Impact: $1.7M+ in UX-attributed growth
For every $1 invested in UX, leadership gained $24 in revenue. This impressive ROI of 24:1 highlights the significant impact that a strong UX strategy can have on business performance, aligning with executive priorities and aiding board-level persuasion.
Annual cost savings: $150K+ through reduced design debt and rework
Time-to-launch: Cut feature delivery cycles from weeks to days
The Impact
TeamGantt reshaped how teams planned, tracked, and delivered work. What started as a simple Gantt chart tool became an intuitive visual planning platform for over one million users. By grounding design in clarity and consistency, teams could spend less time wrestling with tools and more time collaborating. As a result, projects that once took weeks could be launched in just days, empowering teams to achieve their goals faster and with greater satisfaction.
The work wasn’t about adding features—it was about architecting a system that could grow with the business. Every design choice improved trust, predictability, and performance at scale.
The result was a foundation of velocity: fewer bottlenecks, cleaner handoffs, and measurable growth in adoption, conversion, and revenue. Design became the quiet infrastructure that powered the company’s climb from startup to multimillion-dollar SaaS. Looking forward, this system now primes TeamGantt for enterprise expansion, setting the stage for new opportunities and innovations. As the company continues to build on this momentum, it is well-positioned to tackle larger markets and deliver even greater value.
Reflection: Design as Infrastructure
TeamGantt’s evolution proved that design systems aren’t aesthetic—they’re economic. When clarity compounds, velocity follows. The result: a platform that scales not through headcount, but through design maturity.
Role
Founding Head of UX & Design Systems. Partnered directly with the Co-Founder and Engineering leadership to build TeamGantt’s UX foundation from the ground up.
Led the redesign of product, marketing, and onboarding systems, transforming a WordPress MVP into a scalable SaaS platform.
Delivered the company’s design system, accelerated velocity by 65%, and supported ARR growth from $1.7M to $8M while reaching over one million global users.
Solo Design Leadership
TeamGantt’s growth was fueled by a single design seat driving product clarity, consistency, and measurable scale. Solo design leadership in this context meant owning the full design stack—strategy, research, systems, and execution—while aligning tightly with engineering and product to move fast without breaking coherence. This single-seat approach saved an estimated 40 developer-hours per week by reducing redundant development work and improving cross-team communication. By quantifying this leverage, we demonstrated design as a force-multiplier, efficiently fueling TeamGantt’s success.
Operating as both architect and advocate, design became the connective tissue across product and marketing. The approach emphasized repeatable logic over subjective taste, allowing one designer to support a platform used by over one million people and sustain an $8M ARR operation.
Solo design leadership demanded systems thinking—knowing that every button, token, and motion rule represented time saved for the company and velocity gained for the team. Through deep collaboration with engineering, design became a profit center: a multiplier of development efficiency, not a cost line.
By the time the platform scaled, design had evolved into infrastructure—reducing engineering debt, accelerating feature delivery, and directly contributing to recurring revenue growth. It wasn’t design for aesthetics. It was design as leverage.
“Brandon's willingness to collaborate, work with others, and try ideas to see what works. That along with his natural design intuition and talent leads to great outcomes! His sense of humor makes meetings a real joy!”
“Brandon's willingness to collaborate, work with others, and try ideas to see what works. That along with his natural design intuition and talent leads to great outcomes! His sense of humor makes meetings a real joy!”
“Brandon's willingness to collaborate, work with others, and try ideas to see what works. That along with his natural design intuition and talent leads to great outcomes! His sense of humor makes meetings a real joy!”
“Brandon’s sense of humor is awesome. He makes calls fun and keeps work from getting boring. He’s up for challenges and always pushes himself for the best possible design. He’s fast, organized, and has taken TeamGantt Design to a new level. He’s a tremendous person to have on the team.”
“Brandon’s sense of humor is awesome. He makes calls fun and keeps work from getting boring. He’s up for challenges and always pushes himself for the best possible design. He’s fast, organized, and has taken TeamGantt Design to a new level. He’s a tremendous person to have on the team.”
“Brandon’s sense of humor is awesome. He makes calls fun and keeps work from getting boring. He’s up for challenges and always pushes himself for the best possible design. He’s fast, organized, and has taken TeamGantt Design to a new level. He’s a tremendous person to have on the team.”
Related Case Studies
Scaled UX from MVP to enterprise—cut onboarding friction 30% and supported $1.3B growth.
Scaled $500M+ fundraising platform from MVP to acquisition. Led UX, design ops, and trust-first donation flows that enabled scalable giving.
Scaled national EdTech access platform to 25M+ users—led UX for SSO, onboarding, and system growth.
A better system makes everyone’s day less stupid. Clarity pays for itself.
Related Case Studies
Scaled UX from MVP to enterprise—cut onboarding friction 30% and supported $1.3B growth.
Scaled $500M+ fundraising platform from MVP to acquisition. Led UX, design ops, and trust-first donation flows that enabled scalable giving.
Scaled national EdTech access platform to 25M+ users—led UX for SSO, onboarding, and system growth.
A better system makes everyone’s day less stupid. Clarity pays for itself.
Related Case Studies
Scaled UX from MVP to enterprise—cut onboarding friction 30% and supported $1.3B growth.
Scaled $500M+ fundraising platform from MVP to acquisition. Led UX, design ops, and trust-first donation flows that enabled scalable giving.
Scaled national EdTech access platform to 25M+ users—led UX for SSO, onboarding, and system growth.
A better system makes everyone’s day less stupid. Clarity pays for itself.
© 2025 StudioXDS. All rights reserved.
© 2025 StudioXDS. All rights reserved.
©2025 StudioXDS. All rights reserved.
