Case Study 03
Role
Design Lead
Year
August 2024 - October 2025
For 18 months I led design across the portfolio of features that built IES into a viable platform for project-based businesses — construction first, then beyond. AI-powered Project Budgets, Project Profitability, Project Milestones & 20+ project reports.
The work that earned the trust to drive a structural change: unifying Basic and Detailed job costing into a single platform with project-level flexibility, shipped as the foundation for unified costing across every vertical IES will serve.
Scope of Work
How i navigated this project
Much of this work landed during the AI inflection point. Leadership had laid out the guidance to build AI-first features across IES. The design system had
no AI patterns yet. I was one of the designers who established patterns through real product work — embedded cost recommendations at line-item level, AI suggestions with explanations inline, the initial design for immersive AI chat experiences
The bar I held in my own work: AI should be invisible work that happens inside the customer's existing workflow, not a separate destination they have to visit.
Project details
The Goal
Move IES from "horizontal platform with construction features" to "platform built around how project-based businesses actually work" — and set the design direction that the next generation of vertical-specific work would extend.
Project Details
The Process & Hard Design Calls
Some of the major inflection points throughout the project
01
The strategic call
The expedient path was iterating on the existing two-mode costing system. Make Basic costing mode more capable. Make Detailed costing mode easier to configure. Help customers pick the right mode upfront and reduce switching pain through better documentation. That's how feature teams solve feature problems. I pushed for the structural change instead: converge Basic and Detailed into a single unified system, with the costing mode configurable at the project level rather than the company level. Same backend, same data model, same project budget as the source of truth across both modes — with project managers able to toggle Basic → Detailed without data loss or manual rework. The trade was scope. Converging the two modes meant rebuilding the data model so the project budget could serve as the single source of truth across both. It meant new constraints — Detailed → Basic switching deliberately not supported, because the data fidelity loss couldn't be reconciled. It meant absorbing complexity at the platform layer so customers could absorb less complexity at the workflow layer. The argument I made was that this wasn't about Construction. It was about every vertical IES would serve in the next 24 months. A unified costing platform with project-level flexibility scales to any industry — manufacturing, professional services, field services. Two siloed modes don't. The structural choice was the difference between building a feature for Construction and building a platform foundation for project-based businesses across the IES roadmap.
02
Research and discovery
03
Designing AI-First Experiences
Partner Testimonials
"Manas does an excellent job of defining the long-term "North Star" for our products. He creates input goals that impact the wider function by visualizing a clear target state. He pushes me as a PM and our engineering partners to not just settle for the MVP, but to implement a path toward that ideal state."
Vinayak S.
Staff Product Manager, Intuit
"He has the drive to grow into a bold designer who not only builds what's possible — but redefines what's expected."
Shaily Shah
Design Manager, Intuit
