Case Study 01
Role
Design Lead
Year
Nov 2025 - Feb 2026
Scope of Work
How i navigated this project
A three-month build for an enterprise transaction system was only possible because of how I worked with AI. Production-fidelity prototypes generated with AI tools became my primary customer research instrument — not Figma mockups, not interview scripts. Customers saw workflows that didn't yet exist, reacted to them, and surfaced requirements that traditional research wouldn't have caught. Between sessions, I iterated each prototype to incorporate the previous customer's input, so customer N+1 was always reacting to the synthesis of customers 1 through N. This compressed weeks of research-to-design cycles into days.
Project details
The Goal
How might we ship a cloud manufacturing MVP by February 2026 that's competitive enough to keep mid-market customers inside IES — and architected to scale with the next 18 months of inventory roadmap.
Project Details
The Process & Hard Design Calls
Some of the major inflection points throughout the project
01
The strategic call - parity or parity++?
The easy path was parity. Port the QuickBooks Desktop manufacturing experience to the cloud, ship by February, call it done. Desktop customers would have a migration path, the urgent retention risk would ease, and the team would meet the date. I pushed for a different call: Parity Plus a modern experience. Build a cloud manufacturing solution that didn't just give Desktop customers somewhere to land — it gave them a reason to stay, and gave new prospects a reason to choose IES over Katana, NetSuite, Fishbowl, or SOS Inventory. The trade was real. Parity Plus required more design decisions, more competitive research, more arguments with engineering on timeline. Straight parity would have shipped earlier with less friction. But straight parity would have shipped a known-good legacy experience into a market where customers were actively comparing IES to modern manufacturing tools. Migration would have been a defensive move. Parity Plus made it offensive. This decision shaped every downstream choice — what to split, what to compromise, where to hold the line.
02
Research and discovery
03
AI powered execution
04
Splitting Build Assembly into Manufacturing Order + Build Assembly
05
Real-time shortage tracking on the Manufacturing Order form
06
Driving a new form-level dimensions pattern through cross-team collaboration
07
Assembly Item — backend compromise, not front-end
Partner Testimonials
"Manas is able to scale and manage multiple initiatives across PMs — manufacturing, landed costs, serial/lot tracking — and is also able to connect the dots among these like his provocation for a combined serial/lot + bins tracking design."
Yogender Prabhu
Staff Product Manager, Intuit
"Manas goes broad in exploring options, drawing references from across QBO/IES and external apps to inform pattern decisions, and actively tests the product to surface quality bugs upfront. Joined a complex domain mid-year and quickly delivered real output."
Nikita Gill
Design Manager, Intuit
