Time-Phased Budget Visibility for

Marketing Activities

Enterprise teams like Cisco, IBM Corporate, and SolarWinds plan their budgets quarter by quarter, yet our platform originally forced them to attach the entire annual amount to a single activity. This created confusion, misalignment, and hours of manual reconciliation.

Time Phasing was designed to fix this gap - giving marketers a clear quarter-by-quarter breakdown of their connected spend and the confidence to see whether execution truly aligns with budget guidance.

  • Uptempo Plan+Spend (SaaS Platform)

  • 2025

  • Lead Product Designer

  • Project Manager, Engineer Lead, Lead Software Developer, Four (2) Supportive Software Developers, Two (2) Professional Service Team Members, & UX Technical Writer

  • Marketing Technology (Enterprise SaaS)

Problem Space

Most of our enterprise customers — including Cisco, IBM Corporate, and SolarWinds — plan and track budgets quarterly. But our platform attached the entire fiscal-year amount to a single activity, creating misalignment between top-down estimates and bottom-up execution.

This led to inaccurate quarterly forecasting, false cost spikes, and heavy reliance on manual reconciliation whenever marketers shifted plans or compared Estimated vs Connected Spend.

Customers needed a simple way to understand how spend breaks down over time, and to quickly verify whether their quarterly activities truly aligned with budget guidance.

The Challenge

Visualizing complex spend data simply
Multiple categories (Estimated, Committed, Actuals) needed to be shown clearly across quarters without overwhelming users.

Supporting multi-quarter activities and multi-year roadmaps
Budgets and activities often spanned several periods, requiring logic that accurately distributes spend over time.

Maintaining clarity when timelines shift
Marketers expected budget to “follow” activities when moved from one quarter to another — requiring predictable, intuitive behavior.

Reducing the cognitive load
Users needed to see alignment at a glance, without exporting spreadsheets or doing manual math.

⚠️ Some platform screenshots and sticky notes are blurred throughout this case study. These represent my design process at different stages - from research synthesis to testing - while keeping customer data and internal materials confidential.

My goal is to show the thinking and collaboration behind each stage, even when specific content can’t be shared.

how customers experienced the feature

  • Being able to break down connected spend by quarter has dramatically reduced the manual reconciliation we used to do. Time Phasing helps us validate our plans faster and make adjustments with confidence.

    —Global Campaign Planning Lead, SolarWinds

  • The time-phased spend view finally gives our team the clarity we’ve been missing. We can instantly see how our quarterly activities align with budget guidance without exporting anything. It’s simplified our planning conversations across regions.

    —Senior Marketing Operations Manager, Cisco

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