Intro
Qollabi is a platform that helps companies collaborate with partners through shared plans, objectives, and KPIs.
As the product designer on this project, I translated PM-authored user stories into concepts and design proposals, then worked directly with the PM team to align on final designs before handoff to engineering.
Impact
The redesigned system shifted collaboration from fragmented communication to structured, measurable execution:
Time to Alignment
Plan Execution Rate
Problem
Channel Manager
Qollabi gives companies and their partners a shared space to plan, set objectives, and track KPIs together. But partners and internal teams both ran into the same underlying issue: the day-to-day work needed to hit those shared goals was scattered.
10–25 active partner plans per manager
5–10 hours per week spent on alignment
3–5 tools used to manage collaboration
Key findings
There was no single place to see everything assigned to you. Assigned OKRs and quick actions each lived in their own space, so answering "what do I need to do today" meant checking multiple places
The OKR hierarchy made that overview harder to build Objectives, activities, and sub-activities were nested several levels deep -knowing what needed attention today meant drilling into each objective individually
Quick actions didn't belong to the hierarchy at all, but still needed to show up in the same overview
Exploration
The research pointed to one clear need: a central place where a partner could see everything assigned to them, OKRs and quick actions alike without checking multiple views. The open question was how to build that central place: keep OKRs and quick actions in their existing separate structures and hope users found what they needed, or design one unified overview that both types of work could live in.
OKRs and Quick actions are existing in their separate structures Objectives, Activities, and Sub-activities stay organized in their nested hierarchy with drill-down navigation; quick actions live in their own dedicated list, unrelated to the hierarchy
One central, flat overview by default, with hierarchy available on demand and a dedicated view for quick actions. Objectives, opportunities, partners, and quick actions all appear as rows in one central list, with the OKR hierarchy shown as a column rather than a tree to click through.
Solution
Rather than picking flat or hierarchical outright, hierarchy was kept but demoted to an on-demand popover, and a dedicated Quick actions tab stayed alongside the central list for when a partner only cared about that subset. This delivered the central overview without discarding either the hierarchy's context or the value of filtering to one item type.
Added inline quick actions to reduce friction between insight and execution
Learnings
A few clear principles emerged from observing how teams interact with complex systems and collaboration flows. 1.Problem statements can be a research input - dig into the user stories, don't stop at the label 2.Flat-vs-hierarchical wasn't really a binary - the popover gives the context on demand, anchored right where the user asked for it, without disrupting the flat list underneath. 3. One central place ≠ one identical structure (quick actions vs. OKRs staying visually distinct)
Obsphera ›