Relay Timeline

Role

Lead Product Designer

Timeline

12 months (2025)

Themes

Information Architecture · UX Research · Enterprise Workflows

Impact

Shipped 0 to 1. Research influenced the product roadmap, including capacity planning, dependencies, scenario planning, and milestone views.

Relay MAU rose 118% across 2025 with an 18% drop in legacy tool usage, on a platform used by 80,000+ engineers. Timeline was one of several features launched into that period.

I designed a timeline view for Amazon's project management platform, used by 80,000+ engineers. The project started as a “build Gantt charts” request — the top item on the customer wishlist — but research revealed the term meant different things to different people, and the team was headed toward replicating a tool that already wasn't working. I used that research to reframe what we built.

Plans change. So should the timeline.

Research participants wanted a visual way to edit work, not a form. Drag handles on estimate bars let users reschedule directly on the canvas — grab an edge to extend, grab the middle to move.

Hover to separate stacked layers

The existing system required 5 date values per task — estimated start/end, actual start/end, and need-by date — which meant up to 5 date ranges could stack on a single task row. Overlapping bars hide the layers underneath. Hover detection spreads only the colliding layers apart, so each stays reachable without disturbing the rest of the canvas.

Add tasks without leaving the timeline

Participants consistently asked to add tasks without leaving the timeline. Hover a row to reveal the add control, type into an auto-focused input, and the new task drops onto the canvas with a default estimate range.

Click to expand

Attributes on demand

The team wanted assignee, status, and progress on every bar. Research showed simplicity was the timeline's strength, so attributes live in toggleable columns instead — accessible when needed, out of the way when not.

The insight that reshaped the roadmap

20 interviews across 6+ roles revealed “Gantt chart” was shorthand for four distinct mental models: team, project, portfolio, and individual. Each role wanted a timeline for fundamentally different reasons. This finding reframed the product direction and shaped the 2026 roadmap, including capacity planning, dependencies, scenario planning, and milestone views.

Research-informed implementation roadmap

Teams could finally see and communicate project complexity without leaving the tool.

Phase 1 launched in December 2025 with core visualization, inline editing, drag-to-edit, and theme support. The feedback came in unprompted.

What users said in Slack

Organic feedback from #relay-feedback after the December 2025 launch.