Prism

Agencies hit a ceiling around 15–20 people. Below it, the founder holds the whole firm in their head: who's overloaded, which client is going cold, what's slipping. Above it, that breaks. They stop running the work and start running spreadsheets about the work.

Prism holds it instead. Three agents read what's actually happening across Slack, Linear, email, calendar, and time tracking:

• Shepherd watches delivery: scope, deliverables, what's slipping.
• Architect watches the team: capacity, load, who fits what.
• Strategist watches the money: margin, billing, scope creep.

They flag what needs a decision, who to staff, and what to do next. I own the product design, how the agents write, and the staffing logic underneath the screens.

Three things from sitting with agency operators.

Insight 01

"Managers want a queue they can work down"

None of the operators I sat with were studying the charts. At this size the founder is still doing the work themselves, so what they wanted was a short list of decisions to make, in order.

Insight 02

"Ranking people backfired"

The first staffing screen I tested ranked people, and the partners recoiled. A team this size still runs like a family. The moment someone sees themselves scored, they start managing the number instead of the work.

Insight 03

"The real status was never in the tools"

The tools only held what had been assigned. The actual state of a project showed up somewhere messier: a thread going quiet, a status that stayed green while the dates moved.

Every tool a firm pays for tracks what was assigned. None read what actually happened.

That gap is where the margin leaks, and a firm this size has no slack to absorb it. SPI Research puts revenue per head at about $168K, with billable time across the industry at a record low of 66.4%, against the 75% the strongest firms hold¹. The leaks themselves are ordinary: scope creep nobody logged, now on 52% of projects, up from 43% five years earlier²; the designer running at 112% nobody flagged; the client who went quiet three weeks before churning.

PM tools track the tasks and miss the conversation around them. Notion holds documents nobody re-reads. Generic AI waits to be asked. Nothing watches the firm and tells the operator what needs them.

So the design problem: show a firm its own state, read from messy signal, without adding one more dashboard to check. It had to be readable in seconds, trustworthy enough to act on, and calm enough to open every morning.

What shipped, what changed.

• A design system from zero: tokens, type ramp, components, and the agents' writing voice, versioned together. New surfaces inherit the tone instead of reinventing it.
• Ten core flows shipped: Morning Brief, Needs You, Capability Coverage, Compare, Project Page, Performance, Billing, Command, Playbooks, Delivery Kickoff. Engineering builds from the design files, so they stay current rather than trailing the code.
• Reshaped by design partners: their feedback rewrote the staffing logic from a ranking into a map, regrouped the queue by who has to act, and tightened how the agents write.