Jack Brugger

Overview

Lightyear is an AI-powered innovation management software and research tool designed for corporate teams. It helps portfolio and innovation managers organize data, track initiatives, align teams, and report revenue to stakeholders.

Key results

Launched MVP for portfolio managers

Validated portfolio management workflows and partially validated team-member workflows

Received positive user feedback from our client, validating the product vision and design approach

Discovery

I interviewed portfolio and innovation managers with the Product Owner to understand how they use data tools, then built a behavioral framework for how teams think, work, and interact with their systems.

We defined three core personas: team leads and members executing initiatives, portfolio managers overseeing projects, and leadership as the main stakeholder across initiatives.

Learnings

Team members want autonomy on meaningful work, but feel blocked by slow decisions.

Team leads seek visibility and trust, and fear projects stalling or spreading too thin.

Portfolio managers chase revenue growth, but worry about weak monitoring and unclear ROI.

Board members want proof innovation works, and fear wasting budget on unfocused bets.

Problem

Corporate innovation teams like DNB were stuck in manual, fragmented discovery work - scheduling interviews, transcribing, and reporting - without a fast way to turn qualitative data into clear insights. For lean teams in big organizations, this created decision bottlenecks, misalignment, and weak innovation ROI.

Pains

Insights and data scattered across tools like Excel, email, and docs

Unclear system for tracking progress or making decisions

Duplicate work and siloed teams

Reporting is repetitive, inconsistent, and out of sync with real-time data

Solution

We improved the reporting feature, focusing on what information was actually useful to leadership. This helped teams share progress clearly and save time.

Key Features

Invitation and role-based access

Customizable dashboards for overviewing strategic initiatives and KPIs

Reporting tool for custom reports, report feed

Workflow sandmap for research design

Explorer dashboard for tracking visions and insights

Takeaways

Prioritize purpose before process or pixels.

Anchor software design strategy in systems that empower human control.

Maintain rigorous quality standards ruthlessly, but go lean.

Lightyear

Leading design for a proprietary innovation and project management software for an accelerator program.

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