Iterating an existing ops spreadsheet into an approved, decision-ready layout to improve consistency, governance, and time-to-market
Timeline: Oct 2025 – Dec 2025
Summary
When I joined this project, the team was already using an Excel-based tool to review tournament performance and manage optimization recommendations. While it supported the day-to-day workflow, it had become difficult to scan, fragile to maintain, and inconsistent in how decisions were applied across the calendar.
My work focused on iterating that foundation into a clearer and more reliable operational interface—improving prioritization, strengthening decision context, enabling safe bulk actions, and integrating auditability. A core driver throughout the work was time-to-market: reducing the cycle time from insight to published changes without waiting for a full rebuild.
Pilot outcomes (illustrative): reduced overlay, improved average profit per tournament, and a significant reduction in weekly analysis and adjustment time.
Context
Poker tournaments behave as a dynamic ecosystem. Performance shifts over time due to seasonality, schedule effects, competitor activity, and changes in player behavior. Operations teams frequently adjust GTD, buy-ins, time slots, and structure, and those adjustments must remain consistent to avoid unintended effects across the tournament calendar.
My Role
Senior UI/UX Designer working primarily with Business stakeholders and Poker Ops.
Responsibilities included mapping the decision workflow and weekly cadence, identifying friction and risk in the existing Excel interface, iterating layout and interaction patterns to support faster and more consistent decisions, defining guardrails and validation rules to reduce operational errors, and ensuring traceability without adding unnecessary overhead.
Problem
The main challenges were operational rather than analytical:
- High effort to move from performance signals to a clear set of recommended actions
- Inconsistent application of recommendations due to interface complexity and manual work
- Limited support for scalable actions (bulk updates), increasing time and risk
- Insufficient traceability of changes, raising governance effort
- A tool that depended heavily on individual familiarity, reducing resilience during peak periods
Product Goals
- Reduce overlay and improve profitability while maintaining calendar stability
- Increase consistency of operational decisions across the team
- Reduce time spent on analysis, reconciliation, and repetitive edits
- Improve governance through reliable traceability
- Shorten the cycle from insight to decision to published change (time-to-market)
Approach
The Excel tool was already embedded in the team’s operating model. Replacing it would delay value delivery and introduce adoption risk. The approach was to iterate the existing tool and focus on improvements that directly impacted clarity, speed, and operational safety—delivering measurable gains quickly while keeping the workflow familiar.
Key Product Improvements
Prioritization aligned to the weekly decision cycle
The entry experience was restructured to surface what required attention first:
- A ranked opportunity list to focus effort on the highest-impact tournaments
- A health snapshot with trend windows (e.g., 7/14/28 days) to reduce short-term noise
- Filters aligned with operational segmentation (buy-in bands, dayparts, segments)
This reduced time spent identifying where to act and helped standardize review routines.
Recommendation context to improve decision quality
Recommendations were reformatted to include the minimum necessary context for informed decisions:
- Proposed change (GTD / buy-in / slot / structure)
- Rationale expressed in operational terms (trend signals, recurrence patterns, adoption shifts)
- Confidence indicator (high/medium/low)
- Expected impact expressed as a range rather than a single-point estimate
This supported consistent decision-making and reduced review friction.
Bulk actions with guardrails
Bulk updates were designed to support scale without increasing risk:
- Group selection (by buy-in range, daypart, segment)
- Change preview before applying
- Validation rules to prevent inconsistent or unsafe configurations
- Clear accept/reject/edit states to preserve control and accountability
Auditability integrated into the workflow
Traceability was treated as a product requirement:
- Automatic capture of changes (deltas and timestamps)
- Lightweight reasons and short notes when needed
- A review-friendly history view that supports weekly checkpoints and audits
This reduced governance overhead while supporting operational confidence.
Approved Layout
Final layout designed and iterated by me, reviewed and approved jointly with Poker Ops and Business stakeholders.
Outcomes
Over several weeks within a defined tournament slice, results indicated:
- Overlay reduction in the ~15–20% range
- Average profit per tournament improvement around ~8–10%
- Weekly time spent on analysis and adjustments reduced by ~50–60%
- Higher adoption for high-confidence recommendations
In addition, the cycle from review to published changes was reduced, supporting the time-to-market objective.
What This Demonstrates
- Improving a production workflow without disrupting adoption
- Designing for decision quality, operational resilience, and business outcomes
- Balancing speed, guardrails, and governance in a single workflow
- Iterating effectively under time-to-market constraints
Next Steps
- Move the workflow into a web interface with role-based permissions
- Integrate directly with the publishing pipeline
- Add structured feedback loops to calibrate opportunity scoring over time
- Improve explainability for low-confidence recommendations