(01) Case study · 2025
Northwind Labs
Product design and engineering for a fintech reporting dashboard used by 30 finance teams.
Client
Northwind Labs
Year
2025
Services
Product design, design system, front-end engineering
Team
Ines Moreau, Theo Lindqvist, Amara Okafor
Live site
Client
Northwind Labs
Year
2025
Services
Product design, design system, front-end engineering
Team
Ines Moreau, Theo Lindqvist, Amara Okafor
Live site
01 — Challenge
Twelve reports, rebuilt by hand
Northwind Labs sells reporting software to mid-size finance teams, and its own dashboard had become the weakest part of the product. Controllers spent the last week of every month exporting data from four tools, pasting it into spreadsheets and rebuilding the same twelve reports by hand. The old interface showed every metric the database held, with no hierarchy and no saved views, so each person built a private workaround. Support tickets clustered around month-end, and two of Northwind’s largest accounts asked for a roadmap before renewing. The brief was simple to say and hard to do: make month-end boring again, without a six-month rewrite and without breaking the integrations thirty finance teams depended on.
02 — Approach
Cut to the views people use
We sat with eight controllers across three customers for two weeks and recorded every report they rebuilt, which columns they deleted and which numbers they checked twice. That gave us twelve core views and a short list of questions each one had to answer in under ten seconds. Design and engineering worked from one Figma library and one React component set, so every component was designed, coded and documented in the same sprint. We shipped weekly behind feature flags, tested each flow with real ledgers rather than sample data, and kept the old dashboard running in parallel until the new views matched it to the cent. Every decision went into a changelog that finance, product and engineering all read.
03 — Result
Month-end, three days sooner
Reports now build themselves from live ledger data, and the time controllers spend on month-end reporting fell by 41%. Teams close the month three days sooner, and task success in our final usability round reached 98% across all twelve views. The design system we left behind holds 64 documented components, which Northwind’s in-house team now uses to ship new views without waiting on us. Both at-risk accounts renewed for three years, and month-end support tickets dropped to a handful. We still meet the product team once a quarter to review what they have built on top of it. Onboarding was rewritten around the new views as well, which cut setup for new customers from a week to two days.
04 — Numbers
01 — Time to report
−41%
Measured across 30 finance teams after launch.
02 — Kickoff to launch
12 wks
From the first workshop to full rollout.
03 — Task success
98%
In moderated tests on the new reporting flows.
05 — Gallery
(04) Client’s word
“Etch rebuilt our reporting in twelve weeks. Month-end went from a three-day scramble to a Tuesday afternoon, and our analysts finally trust the numbers on screen.”
Maya Hollis
VP Product · Northwind Labs
etch
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