Background
Veridian helps mid-sized manufacturers track Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions across their supply chains. The product worked — the data was there, the integrations were there — but customers kept telling sales the same thing: "It's powerful, but I can't get anyone on my team to use it." Engineers used it. Sustainability leads used it. Operations managers, who actually drive the changes that move the numbers, did not.
We came in to redesign the product around the people who weren't using it yet.
What was breaking
Two weeks of customer interviews and session recordings made the diagnosis fairly clear:
- The dashboard answered "what is our footprint?" but not "what should I do about it this week?"
- Reporting was rich but built for compliance, not for daily operations
- Alerts fired constantly and the team had learned to ignore them
- The "scenarios" feature — the one tool that could drive decisions — was buried three levels deep
"If I can't see what changed and what I should do about it in under a minute, it's not going to fit into my morning."
— Operations manager, manufacturing customer
Re-anchoring the product
We re-anchored the dashboard around a single question: what changed, and what does it mean? Everything else — the historical charts, the granular breakdowns, the compliance views — stayed in the product but moved off the home view.
The new home view shows three things, in this order:
- A weekly delta with one-sentence interpretation written by an LLM trained on the company's own data
- The two or three actions most likely to move next week's number, with effort and impact tags
- A simple line chart of the last quarter, dimmed if no meaningful change happened
Everything else is one click away, but nothing else competes for attention.
Information architecture
The previous app had 47 distinct routes. We mapped each one to one of three jobs and collapsed the navigation to match.
| Job to be done | Routes (before) | Routes (after) | Used by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Understand the current state | 18 | 4 | Operations, leadership |
| Plan next actions | 11 | 3 | Operations |
| Report and audit | 18 | 6 | Sustainability lead, audit |
Total routes dropped from 47 to 13. We didn't delete features — we moved them inside a smaller number of top-level surfaces, each tuned to a specific job and audience.
Data visualization
We replaced every chart in the product. The old library favored visual density; the new one favors interpretation.
- Every chart now has a written summary above it explaining the most important thing it shows
- Color encodes meaning (improvement, regression, hold), not category
- Tooltips show the delta against expectation, not just the raw value
- The legend lives inside the chart, next to the relevant line, so eyes don't have to travel
The team's "five-second test" — can a non-expert tell you in five seconds whether things are getting better or worse — went from 22% pass rate on the old charts to 87% on the new ones.
Performance and accessibility
The product runs in browser environments that are often locked down by enterprise IT. We made hard targets explicit from week one:
- Time to interactive under two seconds on a corporate laptop with throttled CPU.
- Full keyboard support — every chart, every filter, every menu.
- WCAG 2.2 AA across every screen, verified per release.
- No dependency on color alone for any meaningful information.
The bundle is now 38% smaller than before, the dashboard route-changes are entirely client-side after first load, and the contrast audit passes on every screen without exception.
Outcome
Six months after the rollout the picture had changed measurably:
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly active operations users | 12% | 64% |
| Avg. time to first action / week | 4 days | 28 hrs |
| Customer NPS | 22 | 51 |
| Churn (mid-market) | 18% | 7% |
"The product finally feels like it's on our team. We open it on Monday morning instead of dreading the quarterly report."
— Director of sustainability, manufacturing customer
The shift wasn't about adding features — most of what we built already existed in the previous product. The work was making the right things visible at the right time, and getting everything else out of the way.
Looking ahead
The team is now working on a procurement module that uses the same "what changed, what to do" pattern to surface supplier emissions in the moment a buyer is about to place an order — moving the product earlier in the decision cycle, where it can actually shape outcomes.


