Penda (2025)

What they had initially:

Multiple spreadsheets, a WhatsApp group to establish what was actually happening each day, and someone sat in front of the group translating updates into the spreadsheets.

What they have now:

A system that day-one employees and subcontractors take to like a duck to water. 20 people use it regularly with barely any training, and it helps the directors keep a handle on what's happening in their business, as well as helping subcontractors get a clear handle on what they're earning.

We named the resultant system “Penda” after an early Mercian king - with the thought that this system would help them survey and protect their “kingdom”, as well as being my first digital business. Before long we were onboarding not only their contractors and employees, but their clients too.

The impact:

Now they have the infrastructure to reliably grow. They can onboard subcontractors who understand the system immediately & coordinate work across 20 people without constant manual updates that need to be translated into the source of truth. The bottleneck isn't the system anymore. The company is prepared for an influx of work without worrying about administrative overhead - they can just focus on doing the work.

The process:

I started by shadowing them as they used their existing system(s), then used my experience to map that to a data structure, UI, and workflow that makes sense to everyone - whether they're day-one employees or experienced subcontractors.

In 2026, we're all used to a certain standard of UI patterns. We know what makes good UI on account of us using them all day - this became clear to me after the first couple of versions went out, when the client was asking for the features and adjustments that were already on my radar. If you rely on existing patterns, you can build something that looks and acts the part quickly, which in this particular project, was the most important thing.

I worked closely with them to quash my own assumptions about their work, and then we had a solid specification. We got something working within a month, with RLS policies, SQL functions, fast redeployment, and support for multi-tenant users.