Problem
Faculty's data science platform was adding features faster than the navigation bar could carry them, with no design brief handed down. Research with Faculty's own data scientists found the tell: people kept duplicate browser tabs open and typed terminal commands rather than navigate. Five specific failures were documented, including a "help" link that opened a Zendesk field nobody recognised as support.
Approach
Competitor analysis ruled out the category itself: Databricks had no nesting, SageMaker too many layers, Domino's permanently-present bar shrank the workspace. The useful pattern came from outside data science entirely, from Firebase's collapsible, expandable groupings. Grouping strictly by the six-stage data science workflow produced categories of one feature, so the working rule was coarser: input and output. That gave three groups (Development, Production, Project settings), built in one week as an explicit MVP.
Outcome
First internal review came back around 90% positive, called implementable with a little UI work, while the company itself grew roughly tenfold.