Toolbelt

I had the amazing opportunity to work with a nimble team of great software engineers on a web application to bring the best-in-class tools to IBM for daily use. This program was known as Whitewater within IBM, and our app was an access and financial control tool for Business Unit leaders and Financial Analysts.

The success of this program exceeded my expectations. You can’t find a corner of IBM (380,000 employees in 170 countries) where someone isn’t thankful to be able to use GitHub Enterprise, Slack Enterprise Grid, InVision Enterprise, Travis CI, and all of the other tools that this project enabled.

This flow is a re-imagined UI of the tool we built, and shows a couple of the main views, as well as the interaction of granting access of a tool to a team member. The idea is that we could utilize an existing access control app in the back-end to provide our target users with a very simple front-end toggle to grant team member access to each tool.

Towards the end of last year, IBM decided to make these tools available at a seat license level, meaning if you’re a full-time employee, you have access. For us this meant the eventual sunset of this experience. It was interesting to go all the way from MVP, to continuously delivering new user enablements, and to the sunset of a digital product.