Analytics product · ALK
Retiring the spreadsheet
Replacing a hand-built weekly Excel ritual with an iPad-first analytics product for an allergy-care company's field force — then making it stick with a training program its VP called out by name.
- Client
- ALK · field analytics program
- Role
- Product lead — build, rollout, enablement
- Timeline
- 2025 — 2026
- Stack
- Power BI · Mobile-first design · Incentive-compensation data · Training & enablement
The situation
ALK's US field organization — supported through an agency deployment partnership — ran its goal tracking the way many field teams quietly do: recurring incentive-compensation extracts, hand-assembled into a national goal tracker in Excel, emailed around, and re-built again and again.
It worked, in the way manual rituals work: through one person's diligence. And it had a hard constraint the previous tooling ignored — the field works exclusively from iPads. A desktop-shaped report was never going to matter in the field.
The problem underneath
The spreadsheet wasn't the problem; it was the symptom. The field lacked a live, trustworthy view of goals and attainment, leadership lacked a shared one, and every change — new goals, new rosters, new territories — meant manual rework with silent-error risk in the one artifact that determines how people are paid. Few data products carry more emotional weight than the one that tracks incentive attainment.
Decisions that shaped the work
Design for the iPad, not the desktop. Layouts, touch targets, and navigation were built for how reps actually work. For this field force, mobile-first decided whether the product would be used at all.
Earn trust through the transition. For a payout-adjacent product, we ran side-by-side verification against the legacy tracker with the national project director — every target, every roster row — before anyone was asked to switch.
Make change same-day. Goal logic changes mid-quarter; rosters churn. The build absorbed goal-logic and roster changes and shipped them the same day they were requested — repeatedly. Speed on the boring changes is what convinced the field the tool would keep up with reality.
Treat enablement as half the product. Rollout came with structured training sessions, standing office hours, refresher videos, and a touch-base cadence with field leadership. Adoption was designed, not hoped for.
What moved
The Excel ritual retired. Field leadership onboarded onto the live product in October 2025, and by spring the training program had reached the full field force. The agency partner's VP of Incentive Compensation wrote, of the enablement program:
Your leadership and dedication truly stood out … The combination of comprehensive training sessions, ongoing office hours, and the upcoming touch-base meetings sets a strong foundation for the field to get the most out of our reports.
The same-day iteration cadence — goal changes, roster updates, new views — is documented across months of client correspondence, usually punctuated with more exclamation points than consultants are used to receiving.
Lessons
Constraints sharpen products. "iPads in the field" ruled out lazy choices early and made the product better than a desktop brief would have.
Payout data is sacred ground. Side-by-side verification cost two weeks and bought the whole rollout. Skip it and no training program saves you.
Enablement converts delivery into adoption. The dashboard is what we shipped; the office hours are why it's used.
Sources: client & leadership emails sep 2025 – apr 2026