At Laurel, our agent already captured a lawyer’s or accountant’s work and filled in their timesheet for them. The next question was what a firm could learn from all that captured time. The number that matters most to a firm leader isn’t hours worked, it’s the work that quietly never makes it onto a bill, and which matters are at risk because of it. That’s what Signal set out to show.
As one of the product’s co-leads, I owned the information architecture and the data visualizations. We stayed close to users through 1:1s, on-site deployments, and weekly prototypes, and each iteration narrowed the product around one question: where are this firm’s profitability risks? We focused not on the individual as much as on projects and the signals that indicate whether a project is or likely will be unprofitable.
Signal shipped as a new product, and the visualizations became a design system the team keeps building on, including skills that let non-specialists make on-brand charts.
Read more on Laurel’s site about the two work intelligence products: Signal and Work Studio.