← Zach Donnenfield
No. 04 product

From prototype to platform

Customers kept filing small dashboard tickets that each lost on their own. I built the dashboard they were describing as one working prototype, and product and engineering shipped their version.

Outcome Released on the platform in July 2026, addressing open requests from at least nine enterprise accounts that together represent roughly six figures in ARR.

01 / From tickets to prototype Three separate requests, drawn as one dashboard
  1. Customer ticket Bring back export. It was removed and never replaced.
  2. Customer ticket We need more chart types than the default view.
  3. Customer ticket Let us focus on the metric we actually report on.

Reconstruction of the prototype's layout. Invented values, not the shipped product.
Role
Built and shared the prototype.
Period
2026
Team
With product and engineering.

I owned

  • Turning scattered customer tickets into one experience
  • The working prototype and the product decisions in it
  • Making the case to product and engineering

The team owned

  • The production build
  • Prioritization and release timing

Small tickets that kept losing

Enterprise customers had been asking for a better benchmarking dashboard for a long time, one ticket at a time. Export had been removed and never replaced. Chart types were limited. Customers who didn't measure on the platform's default headline metric had no focus metric that fit how they worked.

Each ticket looked small on its own, and together they had lost prioritization debates more than once.

Three requests, built as one dashboard

I built a working prototype of the whole experience, with configurable chart types, a focus-metric selector, export restored and richer interaction inside the charts. Then I put it in front of product and engineering.

A written case would have been quicker to produce. A working dashboard gave the team something to react to.

Product shipped their version

Product and engineering took the concept, reused part of the prototype, rebuilt the rest and shipped it as a platform release in July 2026.

I was credited in the launch announcement, though I'm not on the commit that shipped.