Rebuilding Task Execution for Field Operations
Designing a scalable workflow & system to improve data reliability, accountability, and operational clarity across field teams and HQ.
Confidentiality Notice
Enterprise systems under NDA. Production UI & proprietary logic are intentionally omitted.
Happy to discuss details privately 🙌
Key Outcomes
↑ 45% task completion
↓ 40% untracked tasks
↓ 50% task creation time
Overview
Company operates large-scale agricultural field programs where a single agronomist executes recurring, time-sensitive tasks across multiple farms.
These tasks generate critical operational data used by HQ for planning, forecasting, and intervention. Prior to this redesign, task execution was fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to monitor at scale.
My Role
Led the end-to-end product design
Defined system architecture and interaction patterns
Collaborated closely with PMs, engineers & agronomists
Team
Duration
~5 months
Problems
Method varied across teams, leading to inconsistent & fragmented results
Task creation & assignment were slow and convoluted
Task execution & progress data were unreliable or missing
HQ lacked real-time data & visibility for on-field execution
The core issue wasn’t UI; it was execution reliability & consistency.
Key Constraints
Highly variable real-world farming workflows
Field teams operating with limited time and connectivity
Multiple stakeholder needs (Agronomists, PMs, HQ)
Any solution had to reduce friction for field teams & HQ without sacrificing data quality or scalability.
Key Design Decisions & Trade-offs
Standardization over flexibility
Intentionally constrained task structure to improve consistency and data reliability, accepting reduced customization in exchange for data & operational clarity.
System enforcement over manual discipline
Moved away from "user compliance" by introducing strict validation rules and state-driven workflows, making execution by system the default behavior.
Scannability over density
Prioritize status & progress over detailed inputs, allowing HQ teams to identify progress and status quickly rather than inspect individual tasks.
Outcomes (cont.)
After the rebuild, task creation and execution became system-default, not optional. Tasks were standardized, easier to create, and enforced through clearer states and validation rules. As a result, the system became the primary source of truth for operational work.
This shift led to measurable improvements:
Significantly higher task creation and completion volume, as work moved from fragmented workflows into the system
~40% reduction in untracked or ambiguously logged tasks, improving data reliability
~45% increase in task completion rate, driven by clearer ownership and execution states
~50% reduction in task creation time, enabled by reusable structures and simplified setup
