From stale dashboards to decisions in the field

Every week, field teams in the company’s snack-food division make around 500,000 store visits across North America. The app serves the people who lead them, from District Sales Leaders (DSLs) and Key Account Managers (KAMs) to territory, zonal and account development managers. All of them have minutes per store to decide what to pitch, what to restock and what to fix. The tool meant to help them was a Power BI report.

It was slow. It needed a live connection in stores with poor signal. It took real training just to find the right number. Field leaders had learned to tolerate it.

When I joined the company in 2022, this was my first programme. The brief was simple: move the report to a native iPad app. It turned out to be the first of four. Through 2024, my team designed a family of four field sales apps that replaced about 40 separate tools, one app for each job.

Leadership framed it as a platform change. The more I looked, the more it looked like a user experience problem. A new platform meant new navigation, new terminology, new flows and a new mental model. If we didn’t understand how DSLs and KAMs actually worked, we would rebuild the same frustration on a newer screen.

So I proposed a month of structured research before a single wireframe. The concern was fair: a month meant later delivery and unplanned cost.

I reframed the question: what would it cost to get this wrong? I walked the business through three scenarios: the daily productivity lost by 10,000+ field leaders fighting a confusing interface, the training and support burden across 315,000 storefronts, and the risk of pushing a field workforce onto a tool that didn’t fit their day.

Put that way, an extra month looked cheap. They agreed.

Every design decision had to come with a reason that started with “because we found…”.

The app follows the store visit. I built the information architecture around the visit itself, with one step for each moment, in the order a field leader works.

Action first, analysis one tap deeper. We rebuilt the information architecture from the field up, starting with what field leaders need during a store visit. Account health, visit priorities and sales trends became a scannable dashboard. What needed action came first; what needed analysis sat one tap away.

Offline-first. With engineering, we designed a sync model that keeps the latest accounts, routes and sales figures on the device, so the app works where the signal doesn’t.

Native and one-handed. Swipe, pull to refresh, tap targets sized for someone holding a tablet in one hand, and map-based account views for planning a route. Familiar enough to need no manual.

A design system built to scale. Reusable components, token-based theming and documented interaction standards, so engineering could grow the product without design becoming a bottleneck.

Field leaders didn’t have time to dig through data for opportunities, so I proposed that the app bring them a weekly list instead. AI-generated cards flag a drop in market share, a service gap, unrealised store potential, unsaleables and products that sell well together.

Each card offers two choices: see the actions, or dismiss it. Actions that are accepted go straight into the sell sheet, so an insight becomes part of the pitch in a couple of taps.

To win back the time we’d spent on research, I ran the work in parallel tracks:

• A design pod building flows and prototypes, every decision mapped to a finding
• An iPad-native extension of the design system
• Engineering and data teams involved from day one, with regular review cadences
• Research re-engaged at every sprint release, so concepts were tested while they could still change

In Q1 2023 we piloted with 150 District Sales Leaders, using heat maps, click tracking, error logging and stress tests under real field conditions. What we learned went straight into the final refinement before rollout.

I also asked the team to write a 72-page product handbook, so knowledge transfers easily and new users get going with minimal onboarding.

By Q3 2023, the app was live for 10,000+ field sales users, bringing sales insights, streamlined store visits and in-store surveys into one app.

This programme taught me that a designer’s real leverage in a big company is winning the room before the work starts. Get that right, and you earn the time to get the details right.