PwC · The tool that replaced the spreadsheet
My role: Product design and research, embedded with product owners and the practice's own experts.
An engagement-management platform for PwC Italy's risk assurance practice, the internal tool teams use to run client engagements end to end. It replaced a tangle of spreadsheets and email, so the real competition wasn't another product. It was a habit that already worked well enough.
This work is under NDA. This is a text case study; I walk through the full detail in live conversations.
Research
You can’t design an expert’s tool from the outside. I spent the research phase with the practitioners, mapping how an engagement flows, where the spreadsheet did five jobs at once, and which of those jobs people would never give up.
The insight that shaped the product: the spreadsheet survived because it was fast and unopinionated. Any replacement had to be at least as fast, or it would lose to the old habit no matter how much more it could do.
Designing the workflows
Model the real work, not the org chart
The information architecture followed how engagements progress, not how the software team thought about data.
Enterprise scale, human pace
Dense information, lots of state, many roles, presented so one person can still move through their piece fast. Tables that behave, statuses that are obvious, no ceremony where speed matters.
Consistency as a system
A component and pattern system kept a large, multi-screen platform coherent and made it maintainable as the practice’s needs grew.
What happened
The platform replaced the spreadsheet workflow it was built to beat, the hardest bar an internal enterprise tool can clear. Specifics are under NDA; I’m happy to walk through the research and the workflow decisions in conversation.