People Manager
"How much time did each person on my team submit?"
Back to work
01 — Sage Intelligent Time
Designing a faster, more flexible time approval experience
Led a shift from a single-page redesign to a full workflow overhaul, improving how managers approve time across different scenarios.
Approvals were slow, fragmented, and didn't fit how managers actually worked.
Managers struggled to efficiently approve timesheets across different teams and projects.
- 01 Fragmented workflows across multiple tools
- 02 Limited flexibility depending on approval style
- 03 Overly complex, text-heavy interfaces
- 04 Lack of visibility into what actually required attention
As a result
- Approvals were slower than necessary
- Errors were harder to catch
- The experience didn't adapt to different manager needs
A tool used to track time across people and projects.
Sage Intelligent Time is used by organizations to track employee time across projects. Managers are responsible for reviewing submitted time, approving or rejecting entries, and ensuring accuracy for payroll and project tracking.
Two primary user types emerged in research — people managers, focused on team productivity, and project managers, focused on budgets and compliance.
Reframing a UI redesign into a workflow redesign.
Most redesigns start with the design. This one started by questioning whether we were being asked to solve the right problem in the first place.
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01Initial direction
The project was scoped as a redesign of a single approvals page.
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02What I noticed
Through research and early exploration, it became clear that the core issues weren't isolated to one screen — they were rooted in fragmented workflows and inconsistent approval patterns.
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03What I did
I worked with the product manager to reframe the problem from a UI redesign to a workflow redesign.
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04Outcome
We expanded the scope to rethink the entire approval experience, which led to a more flexible system supporting both manager types.
Two managers. Two mental models of the same data.
Through research, we found that approvals are high-stakes for employees — directly tied to payroll accuracy, with mistakes creating financial and operational issues. Managers prioritize speed, needing to process many approvals quickly and only investigating when something looks off. And different roles require different levels of detail.
Two distinct user mindsets
Type 01
Type 02
Project Manager
"How much time was logged against each of my projects?"
The two manager types didn't just need different levels of detail — they had fundamentally different views of the same data. People managers think about time per person. Project managers think about time per project. The approval system needed to support both mental models, not force one group into the other's workflow.
Design a system that adapts to the manager, not the other way around.
- Enables fast approvals by default
- Surfaces detail only when needed
- Adapts to different manager workflows
Two views of the same data, in one system.
Two directions emerged from the two user types — and rather than choosing one, we designed a system that supported both. Both views lived within the same application, accessible from a shared navigation menu, so managers could easily reach either depending on what they needed.
Employee-grouped approval
For people managersTime is organized by employee, showing each person's submitted timesheet. Managers can approve at the timesheet level or drill into individual entries when something needs closer inspection.
Project-grouped approval
For project managersTime is organized by project, aggregating hours across employees. Managers can review allocations and flag discrepancies against budgets — moving fluidly from the full list down into a single entry's detail.
What we shipped, and what it changed.
- Shipped a redesigned approvals experience that replaced a single page with two dedicated views tailored to how people managers and project managers actually work.
- Enabled bulk approval at the timesheet level with drill-in for detailed review, reducing the number of steps required for routine approvals.
- Unified two previously disconnected approval patterns within a single application, so managers could switch between employee and project views as needed.
- Established a more flexible foundation for future approval scenarios as Sage Intelligent Time expanded.
What I'd do differently, and what stuck with me.
What I would improve
- Add smarter signals to highlight anomalies automatically.
- Validate impact with more quantitative metrics.
- Further personalize the experience based on manager role.
Enterprise tools don't need to be complex — thoughtful structure and progressive disclosure can make even dense workflows feel simple and efficient.