Overview
TeamGantt was built for teams that needed more structure than a spreadsheet but did not want the weight of enterprise project management software.
That clarity was the product’s advantage. It was also the hardest thing to protect as the platform grew.
Over seven years, TeamGantt expanded beyond Gantt charts into boards, workload, dependencies, reporting, collaboration, mobile, templates, pricing, education, and a larger public product experience. Each new capability increased the value of the platform. It also increased the risk that customers would have to understand more of the product before they could get work done.
I joined as the founding Head of UX and Design Systems and served as the principal product designer across web, iOS, and Android. My role covered the full experience, from product direction and core workflows to design systems, onboarding, pricing, brand, marketing, and engineering delivery.
The work was not one redesign. It was a long-term product system built to let TeamGantt grow without fragmenting the experience that made it useful.
The product had outgrown its MVP
Navigation, task planning, dependencies, workload, project setup, and account management had evolved at different times. Similar actions behaved differently across the interface. New features added capability, but they also increased cognitive load.
The problem was not missing functionality.
Customers had to understand too much of the product before they could complete basic work.
Research, support themes, usage behavior, and customer conversations pointed to the same recurring friction.
New teams struggled to create a useful project quickly.
Core planning actions were distributed across multiple interface areas.
Dependencies were powerful but difficult to predict.
Automation could save time while reducing a user’s sense of control.
Advanced features risked overwhelming customers with simpler planning needs.
Product and marketing experiences were beginning to drift apart.
Engineering was rebuilding patterns that should have been shared.
At the time, churn reached as high as 12%.
The product needed a stronger model before additional growth compounded the existing problems.
One planning model across the product
I treated TeamGantt as a connected planning system rather than a collection of features.
The core workflow was consistent.
Create a project.
Define the work.
Organize tasks over time.
Connect dependencies.
Assign people and workload.
Track progress and collaborate.
Adjust the plan as conditions changed.
Different teams entered that model in different ways. A marketing team might begin with a template. A construction team might begin with dates and dependencies. A small agency might work primarily from Board view. A project manager might move constantly between Gantt, workload, and reporting.
The interface needed one shared structure beneath those variations.
I established consistent patterns for navigation, project structure, task behavior, dates, dependencies, assignment, status, feedback, and account-level controls. New features could extend known behavior instead of introducing another product model customers had to learn.
The standard for product decisions changed with it.
A feature was not successful because it added another control. It needed to make the planning workflow easier to understand, faster to complete, or more useful over time.
Reaching value before learning the whole product
Onboarding exposed the larger product problem clearly.
New users arrived with a goal, but the product initially asked them to make too many structural decisions before they had experienced any value. They needed to understand projects, tasks, groups, dates, dependencies, assignments, and views before they could see a useful plan.
I redesigned onboarding around the first successful planning outcome.
The experience helped a new team reach a usable timeline quickly. Setup decisions were introduced in sequence. Templates reduced blank-state effort. Guidance appeared inside the workflow instead of in a separate instructional layer. The product gave customers enough structure to move forward without forcing everyone into the same project model.
The onboarding system balanced two needs.
Give new customers a clear path forward.
Preserve enough flexibility for different planning methods.
This work improved time to value by 25% and contributed to the broader reduction in churn.
Making automation understandable
TeamGantt’s customers did not all plan the same way.
Some wanted automation. Others wanted direct control over every date and dependency. Some needed a fast visual plan. Others managed complex schedules with multiple teams and resource constraints.
The product could not support that range by adding settings for every preference.
The stronger approach was to create predictable defaults, then introduce control where it changed the outcome.
This principle guided the platform.
Automation updated work without hiding the result.
Dependency behavior stayed visible and reversible.
Advanced controls appeared when relevant instead of dominating the primary workflow.
Different views represented the same project model rather than separate products.
Users could move between Gantt, Board, workload, and reporting without rebuilding their plan.
Dependencies made this tension especially visible.
A dependency is simple in theory. One task must occur before another. In practice, users needed to understand task order, date changes, lag, schedule movement, exceptions, and the effect of editing either side of the relationship.
I reframed dependency behavior around three questions.
What is connected?
What changed?
What will happen if I move this task?
Creation, editing, visual feedback, schedule movement, and exception handling became easier to predict without weakening the scheduling model.
The goal was not maximum automation. It was useful automation that preserved understanding.
Expanding the platform without splitting the product
As TeamGantt grew, the product expanded beyond its original timeline experience.
Board view supported teams that organized work by status. Workload and resource planning helped managers understand capacity across people and projects. Reporting, discussions, templates, and mobile experiences extended the platform into more of the team’s daily work.
The challenge was maintaining one product model across those surfaces.
Board view could not become a separate task system. Workload could not introduce another assignment model. Mobile could not become a read-only companion. Each surface needed to reflect the same project structure while adapting to a different use case.
I led product design across those experiences and used the design system to maintain continuity across web, iOS, Android, product marketing, and support content.
The platform became broader without requiring customers to learn a separate product for each capability.
The system behind product delivery
TeamGantt had a small team and a large product surface. Design and engineering could not afford to solve the same interaction problem repeatedly.
I built the design system alongside product delivery.
The system established shared foundations across typography, color, spacing, layout, components, states, navigation, forms, data presentation, responsive behavior, and mobile patterns. It connected Figma, reusable CSS, Storybook, and production components.
The important measure was not component count.
It was whether the system reduced ambiguity and made the next feature easier to deliver.
Governance focused on practical decisions.
Reuse an existing pattern when the behavior matched.
Extend a pattern when the need was related.
Create a new pattern only when the product introduced different behavior.
Document interaction and state logic, not only visual appearance.
Validate implementation before inconsistencies spread across the product.
Product and marketing shared the same visual foundations while retaining the patterns required by each environment.
This work improved engineering delivery consistency by 65% and reduced effort lost to duplicated patterns and rework.
Extending the product into growth
The public product experience evolved alongside the application.
TeamGantt needed to explain a flexible planning platform to customers with different levels of project management experience. The website, pricing model, templates, guides, educational content, and product launches became part of the same experience system.
I led the redesign of the marketing platform and moved the site to Webflow to improve publishing speed, performance, and experimentation.
The public experience helped visitors understand three things quickly.
What TeamGantt helps a team do
How it differs from heavier project management tools
Which product path fits the way that team works
Pricing and plan selection were redesigned around customer needs instead of a feature inventory. Product education expanded through guides, templates, video, and content programs that helped customers understand both the software and the planning practices behind it.
That broader system increased conversion by 20% and gave the company a faster way to support launches, test positioning, and explain new capabilities.
Product judgment with limited data
TeamGantt did not always have the research infrastructure or sample sizes available inside a larger product organization.
That did not remove the need for evidence. It changed how evidence was assembled.
I combined customer conversations, support themes, usage behavior, sales feedback, product analytics, usability sessions, and direct observation of where customers became confused.
The goal was not to wait for perfect certainty.
It was to make the best available decision, define what should change if the decision was wrong, and keep the product flexible enough to learn.
This mattered most when protecting the core workflow.
Requests often reflected a legitimate local need. The product still had to determine whether solving that need would strengthen the shared system or add another exception customers would need to understand.
The recurring question was simple.
Does this make planning clearer for more teams, or does it make the product more configurable for one case?
That judgment helped the platform expand while preserving a recognizable product model.
“Brandon’s collaboration, design intuition, and willingness to test ideas led to great outcomes.”
“Brandon’s collaboration, design intuition, and willingness to test ideas led to great outcomes.”
“Brandon’s collaboration, design intuition, and willingness to test ideas led to great outcomes.”
Business impact
The work supported TeamGantt’s growth from an early SaaS company into a mature planning platform.
ARR grew from $1.8M to $8M.
UX-attributed growth reached $1.7M.
Conversion increased 20% through improvements to performance, pricing, and core flows.
Time to value improved 25% through onboarding and activation changes.
Churn decreased from 12% to 4% as workflow clarity and product adoption improved.
Engineering delivery consistency improved 65% through shared components, standards, and Storybook documentation.
The platform grew to more than 1 million users across 25,000+ teams.
The results came from the full product system rather than one redesign.
Onboarding improved the first experience. Core workflow changes made planning easier to understand. The design system improved delivery. Pricing and marketing strengthened acquisition. Platform expansion increased the value of the product over time.
Role
Head of Product Design and Design Systems
2016–2023
Served as the founding design leader and principal individual contributor across web, iOS, and Android.
Owned product design, design systems, onboarding, pricing, growth, marketing systems, mobile experience, product launches, and design-to-engineering delivery.
Partnered directly with the founders and engineering leadership to shape product direction, simplify complex planning workflows, establish reusable systems, and connect design decisions to customer and business outcomes.
Reflection
TeamGantt taught me that product simplicity is not created by limiting capability.
It comes from giving a growing system a clear structure.
The work connected decisions at every level. The onboarding sequence. The behavior of one dependency. The relationship between Gantt and Board. The architecture of the design system. The pricing model. The public product story. The way design decisions reached production.
Over seven years, those decisions allowed TeamGantt to become a broader product without losing the reason customers chose it in the first place.
“Brandon is fast, organized, brings a great sense of humor, and took TeamGantt design to a new level.”
“Brandon is fast, organized, brings a great sense of humor, and took TeamGantt design to a new level.”
“Brandon is fast, organized, brings a great sense of humor, and took TeamGantt design to a new level.”
