New feature development
I led the design of Tara.ai's Blockers Report, an onboarding feature that gave engineering managers instant visibility into stalled tasks across GitHub, Jira, and Slack — a key gap in existing tools like Jira.
Over 12 weeks, I collaborated with product, engineering, and customer success to survey users, run interviews, and prototype solutions. The final experience introduced a "Blocked" status with required comments, an automated Blockers Report with actionable insights, and Slack notifications. These improvements cut down manual tracking, improved team transparency, and positioned Tara as a proactive, time-saving tool.
Owned end-to-end experience from discovery through delivery.
Co-led user research and insight synthesis, translated findings into product direction, designed core user flows and interactions, and partnered closely with engineering to iterate and execute.
Defined key customer segments — Engineers, Engineering Managers, Product Managers. Designed and ran a survey to identify the top 3 problems across segments.
Engineering Managers are tasked with getting things done on time and supporting their team. They need better ways to identify these invisible tasks which are potential blockers.
An engineer needs to give achievable but at the same time ambitious estimates to improve the team's confidence about their ability to deliver the product.
Engineering Managers need to improve time management. New priorities added by external teams cause delays. They need better ways to balance and align on scope and priorities with stakeholders.
Stakeholders need to have connected cross-platform data for better visibility of project fundamentals (ticketing, designs, code, marketing, business models, QA tooling).
Before committing to a solution, we evaluated multiple opportunities with product and engineering using an Impact vs. Effort framework.
We compared each idea based on:
"How can we help engineering managers to ensure they meet their goals, without spending exorbitant amount of time identifying blockers?"
Engineering Manager at Notion
Owns delivery for a growing team of 6–7 engineers.
Primary Goal: Consistently hit deadlines while keeping work moving.
Key Pain: Work sits in "in progress" too long, making delivery risks hard to surface early.
CTO at Placenote
Leads engineering for an 8–10 person team.
Primary Goal: Maintain execution health and retain high-performing engineers.
Key Pain: Stale PRs, idle reviews, and unanswered GitHub comments quietly turn into major blockers.
Engineering Manager at Netflix
Oversees delivery for a 12-person team.
Primary Goal: Balance output, quality, and team efficiency.
Key Pain: Spends excessive time on invisible work; fixing code, reviewing, and merging PRs — reducing time for planning and risk management.
Most of the blockers are coming from existing toolings like Github, Jira and Slack.
Tara is already integrated with Github and Gitlab, we can use this to leverage and pull data that could identify blockers in Git Repositories from external resources.
Marking tasks as blocked would give the Engineer Manager more information about why this task needs attention.
We can become an integral tool for project management for any team and increase the growth for our product.
Task marked Blocked by a user in Tara
Task is past due or unaddressed in a sprint
Task detected from Jira, GitHub, or GitLab was pending
To design our solution we created multiple iterations to see what worked for us and what didn't.
Managers needed more context around blockers. Just labeling a task "blocked" wasn't enough — they wanted to know why.
We iterated through various options to identify why a task was blocked.
Transparency improved with lowest friction for users.
Even when blockers were logged, managers could struggle to find them quickly in large sprints.
We added blocked status filtering, surfaced blockers, and made blocked tags more visible across the product.
Blockers became much easier to discover.
Managers wanted to track, share, and resolve blockers systematically — not just mark them.
We designed a dedicated Blockers Report in three forms: Dashboard for visual summaries, List view for details and sharing, and Integrated panel for deeper in-product visibility.
The list-based report struck the right balance between clarity and actionability. The fully integrated panel felt noisy and overwhelming.
I partnered with our senior designer to extend Tara's design system, building new components like status tags, modals, and reporting tables that balanced consistency with fresh solutions.
We designed the onboarding flow to include a step where users connected GitHub or GitLab, instantly generating their first Blockers Report. This gave engineering managers immediate visibility into blockers from their team's workflows, allowing them to see Tara's value from the very first session.
We introduced a dedicated 'Blocked' status to capture when tasks were stalled and require context for why. Dependent teams were notified automatically, giving engineering managers real-time visibility into delays, actionable next steps to resolve them, and clearer insight into patterns that impacted project timelines.
We designed the Blockers Report as a dedicated section that aggregated blockers across tools like GitHub and Jira. Pulling in signals such as unmerged PRs, unresolved comments, or missed deadlines, the report highlighted blockers in Tara and through notifications. This gave engineering managers a sprint-level view of all blockers, helping them take quick actions; like messaging the assignee or setting up a discussion and identify broader patterns slowing down delivery.
In the third phase, we extended the Blockers Report into Slack to bring visibility directly into teams' daily workflows. The integration allowed engineering managers to:
Blockers Report email tested as MVP with all the users.
Customers found it immediately useful. Greenlight for full feature development.
reduction in churn rate, improving retention and revenue
When blockers surface automatically (instead of being manually tracked), teams act faster and more consistently.
Bringing blockers into Slack removed friction and dramatically increased adoption.
"Blocked" alone isn't useful — why something is blocked unlocks real action.