At PLAY we sometimes had a hack day to come up with ideas for products and build a quick prototype.

The problem

As a new joiner, I realised I had very little visibility on what the different teams were working on. Indeed it was up to product managers to liaise with each other to pool or move resources and there was not a single source of truth accessible to everyone.

The solution

After speaking with the CTO and Product managers, and understanding where all projects data was stored (a series of different spreadsheets for timings and budget) I drew up a quick idea for an internal public display of all projects to they would be accessible at a glance to everyone: it was not a question of creating a new tracking tool and change everyone’s habits, it was a way to centralise the results and allow anyone to have a bird’s eye view of everything that was going on. I called this project “Eye in the Sky”.

The outcome

My project was voted 1 of 2 to be built that day (out of 6 proposals) and so I set out with the CTO and a back end developer to build it. I designed the interface keeping close to PLAY joyful and colourful brand and using staff images to illustrate the status of each project, with the main focus on time and budget, real vs. projected at that given project phase.

The project won the day, but the best outcome was that it was indeed implemented and within a couple of weeks (until the merge of PLAY with hundo) we had a display in reception where a live feed of “Eye in the Sky” showed status of our different project in a simple and fun way.