Plenty of real workflows run on spreadsheets. They are flexible, familiar and free — until the team grows, columns multiply and nobody is sure which row is current. This is a sample walkthrough of turning one of those sheets into a product.
Map the work, not the sheet
The sheet shows what people record, not what they do. Shadowing the team for a few days surfaced the real steps: receive a referral, check eligibility, chase missing documents, hand off to intake. Several columns turned out to be workarounds for missing statuses.
- Which columns are typed by hand every time?
- Which ones are copied from somewhere else?
- Which ones nobody has filled in for months?
Cut columns ruthlessly
Every column you keep is a decision people have to make. Merging, deriving and hiding fields brought the working view down to the handful people actually scan, with the rest available on the record itself.
The goal wasn't a prettier spreadsheet. It was fewer things to keep in your head.
Design the hand-offs
Spreadsheets fail at hand-offs: who owns this row now? Clear statuses, an owner on every item and a visible history made the transitions explicit instead of tribal knowledge.
The new tool did less than the sheet in theory, and much more in practice.
