Stripe
About
Making early planning more predictable.
Compass helps Stripe teams plan projects, share progress, and coordinate launch reviews. My work connected reusable plans, review timing, and the overview people needed to understand what was coming next.
The challenge
Planning early should not start work too early.
Compass needed teams to enter projects early so leadership could see upcoming work. But completing review intake could initiate reviews before a project was ready. Planning information came with coordination work that people had not intended to start.
I spoke with PMs and other users who had reported problems with the review process. Some delayed entering projects to avoid that overhead. The design challenge was to make the consequences of planning easier to anticipate.
Review timing
Make the next step predictable.
Intake, milestones, and review status lived across different surfaces. I explored bringing them together, then focused on review timing within the existing application structure.
The direction made planned review starts visible against release timing, while retaining a way to begin earlier. It addressed when downstream work started without requiring a complete rebuild of the product.
Reusable plans
Work backwards from the release.
Project templates gave teams a reusable milestone plan. Relative dates became a concrete schedule once a target release date was supplied.
Anchoring the plan to the release made the relationship between milestones easier to understand. The later prototype makes those relationships visible in a connected timeline.
Portfolio visibility
See the work without opening every project.
A portfolio view brings project health, ownership, progress, and release dates into the same scan. People can compare the work first, then open the detail that needs attention.
The current reconstruction pairs that overview with a project drawer. The drawer’s inline reviews are a later exploration; the original drawer used a launch-readiness banner.
The throughline
A plan people can act on.
Templates, review timing, and the portfolio view address different parts of the same job: making a future plan useful to the people who depend on it.
These screens reconstruct the work and extend selected interactions for the portfolio. They illustrate the design decisions without presenting prototype behavior as a measured launch outcome.
Product design by Xiang Gao, in collaboration with the Compass team. Screens shown are later reconstructions and design explorations using fictional project data.