Overview
Peak production season at a family-owned commercial greenhouse means managing and planting an influx of hundreds of thousands of plants every spring. Plants pour in on a daily basis, needing space and care—tens of thousands of pots need to be filled with mountains of soil—staff clamor for decisions and guidance—and at the center of it all, swamped by details and overwhelmed by interruptions: a single, solitary person.
As I grew in my job and took on increasing responsibility, I found myself inexorably drawn in to that critical role in the eye of the storm.
From the outset, it was clear things needed to change, but how? I talked to staff, I consulted with management, and I began to design. Two core issues quickly emerged as the main sources of this bottleneck problem. The first was that decisions weren’t happening fast enough, and staff were often left waiting for direction. Decision-making was slowed by siloed information that involved manually sorting through piles of paper records to understand priorities and status. I solved this by designing a digital information repository that provided immediate access to up-to-date information, allowed for dynamic sorting to plan across multiple scenarios, and provided shared understanding across stakeholders and teams, improving communication and cross-team coordination.
The second issue was that too much of the workload was concentrated in a single role. To address this, I redesigned the inventory system to give staff easy, independent access to materials so they could reliably locate the plants and labels they needed on their own. This decentralized the procurement effort, diffusing it across the team, and was a major win for staff autonomy.
Together, these two high-impact design decisions majorly improved the speed, accuracy and reliability of operations, and reshaped the work experience from stressful and reactive to structured, coordinated and purposeful.
Problem
Two core workflow breakdowns
1 | Limited access to timely information for decision-making
Decisions relied on fragmented paper records, memory, and verbal updates rather than a shared, up-to-date source of information. This made it difficult to quickly assess what was urgent, what was complete, and how priorities were shifting across teams.
2 | Workload concentrated in a single coordination role
Operational knowledge and decision-making were concentrated in one person who was also responsible for executing and communicating day-to-day priorities. This created a bottleneck where planting, container filling, and plant care all depended on a single point of coordination for direction and access to materials.
Objectives
Design Process
Constraints
Seasonal production created rapidly shifting operational conditions, requiring systems that could account for and accommodate changing space, staffing, inventory, and delivery constraints
Operational priorities were influenced by multiple stakeholders with competing goals and overlapping responsibilities, requiring continuous negotiation and cross-team alignment
The live production environment was highly sensitive to disruption, requiring iterative changes that could be evaluated in real time and rolled back if they introduced operational instability
Design Interventions
1 | Shared Source of Truth
2 | Inventory Systems Revolution
The second major operations breakdown was the extent to which routine planting work depended on one person to locate and retrieve materials. A single person was responsible for the planning, assignment, and procurement labor for every single planting task executed throughout the day.
To alleviate this pressure, I democratized the physical inventories, restructuring them around a shared organizational framework with consistent labeling and documentation, allowing planting staff to independently locate, retrieve, and manage materials without continual administrative mediation. The system intentionally aligned with existing informal workflows and mental models, enabling adoption without disrupting ongoing production or requiring extensive retraining.
This change gave planting staff greater self-determination within the production process and built a stronger foundation of trust between management and staff, improving communication and coordination, and softening the rigid hierarchical dynamic around materials access and execution.
Impact
What began as a storm of data, dependencies, constraints and responsibilities swirling around a single beleaguered coordinator was gradually stabilized through strategic interventions and steady, iterative system improvements. These interventions produced meaningful human and operational impacts across the business:
The creation of a shared digital data repository provided real-time visibility into production status and shifting constraints, supporting alignment and negotiation of priorities across teams and leadership
Inventory redesign empowered staff to access materials directly, increasing staff autonomy and operational efficiency, and building trust across staff and management
Improved visibility enabled rapid prioritization and task forecasting, allowing staff to work full shifts independently, where previously even half-hour coordinator absences had stalled production
Diffusion of the workload and clarified ownership of work reduced stress and increased staff confidence, accountability, and proactive communication around issues
Together, these changes reduced fragile, dependency-heavy bottlenecks and evolved more collaborative systems of coordination and execution, able to withstand operational pressures and shifting constraints.
Takeaways
This project reinforced the importance of shared, reliable information as the basis for coordination in fast-moving operational environments. When teams are working from fragmented records and verbal updates, even simple decisions get bogged down, and knowledge tends to percolate slowly through limited channels, limiting agency for decision-making and practical action. Creating a shared operational view creates unified understanding across teams, and enables stakeholders to effectively align on priorities without relying on constant intermediary coordination.
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