Breaking the technical ceiling

I led a team of two mid-weight designers on Account Reconciliation, a multi-year initiative to automate one of the most labor-intensive processes in finance. This project went beyond a design challenge, becoming a catalyst for engineering transformation.

The complexity of our financial requirements exposed severe limitations in our internal tech stack (XO), which was originally architected for Human Capital Management, not Finance. By systematically documenting these gaps and quantifying the business risk, I influenced executive leadership to authorise a hybrid engineering strategy - blending native code with React - to deliver a competitive experience.

The impact

• The new hub is projected to reduce manual reconciliation time by 160+ hours per month for enterprise finance teams.

• Our demo at Workday Rising received an audience score of 4.92/5, incredibly high for a Financials session.

• My Experience Gaps analysis led to a top-down strategy change, allowing engineering teams to adopt a hybrid approach (XO + React) for the first time, unblocking future roadmap innovation.

Failing to compete

Reconciliation is ultimately a truth test - matching the story the system tells with the money that actually moved. For many companies this critical activity is undermined by fragmented data and human error. This process is spread across systems, spreadsheets, and emails, leaving teams to manually copy balances and chase sign-offs with little visibility into what was done, pending, or stuck.

Our legacy solution was failing to compete. Sales data indicated that Reconciliation gaps were responsible for 45 deal risks/losses in the previous year alone. Customers explicitly stated our UI felt dated compared to competitors, and the lack of automation was a showstopper in deals.

Strategic Scoping

I managed two mid-weight designers, setting the strategic vision while they executed the detailed UI. The scope was vast, so I facilitated a 3-day kick-off workshop to align Product, Engineering, and Design on a feasible MVP to deliver in 6 months.

I used the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to map the reconciliation process by user intent, agnostic of any tool. From here I created a comparative matrix, analysing Workday’s current ability to meet user intent against competitors. Using this data, we prioritised our efforts into three core MVP workstreams: Implement & Maintain, Deliver on Time, and Prepare & Review. We also defined two parallel AI workstreams to ensure we innovated beyond basic efficiency: AI-powered Configuration and Auto Prepare Cash.

The XO reality

We followed a rigorous design process: moving from content maps to wireframes to high-fidelity prototypes. During the wireframe stage, we collaborated with engineering to map our designs to existing XO components.

Two critical challenges emerged from this mapping process:

• Pattern Gaps: XO was built for HR workflows. Complex financial patterns, such as vertical calculation grids (Balance A + Adjustment B = Final Balance), simply did not exist in the library.

• Interoperability: Components were siloed. We discovered that some components, like certain types of tables, could not interact with other framework elements, such as the filter pipeline.

We faced a choice: dilute the experience to fit the tool, or push for the necessary tech stack.

Escalating limitations

As technical hurdles mounted, I established a living Experience Gaps Analysis to track every friction point and attempted mitigation. What began as a tracking log revealed a critical inefficiency: we were burning excessive development cycles on "workarounds" that still resulted in a compromised user experience.

Recognizing we had reached a tipping point, I evolved the document from a design audit into a strategic business case. I added an executive summary that translated these technical constraints into direct business costs and lost revenue risks. This artifact went up the executive chain, providing the compelling evidence needed for leadership to pivot to a hybrid strategy, authorizing the use of React for mission-critical financial patterns.

A hybrid command centre

With the technical constraints lifted, we designed a workspace that balanced automation with the high-density visibility Accountants requires.

AI-first configuration
Internal research showed that pilots often failed due to the heavy lift of manual configuration and governance. To address this, we designed an AI-powered onboarding flow that ingests external CSV reconciliation data without requiring complex Enterprise Interface Builders (EIBs) . This automated "once-off" implementation is targeted to reduce setup time by 80%, clearing the primary hurdle to adoption.

Designing for density
While progressive disclosure is standard in modern UX, we prioritised Data Density because finance professionals make critical decisions based on the relationship between multiple data points. The Reconciliation Workspace displays the Ledger Balance, Supporting Balance, and Difference on a single screen, allowing users to audit "Reconciling Items" and approve without navigating away, satisfying their need for full context.

Learnings

Quantify the experience gap
Subjective arguments about "good UX" rarely win against hard engineering constraints. I learned that to drive platform-level change, I had to speak the language of business risk. By documenting specific experience gaps and mapping them to lost sales deals, I shifted the conversation from personal preference to a commercial necessity.

Find the technical ceiling early
We didn't wait for the build phase to find the technical ceiling. By rigorously mapping wireframes to the XO component library early in the process, we exposed the interoperability issues while they were still cheap to fix. This "technical pre-mortem" proved that standard components couldn't support the user's mental model, allowing us to pivot our engineering strategy before committing resources to a dead end.