Client Story
A global consulting partner was mid-engagement on a long-running portfolio-readiness programme for a public-sector authority. The partner’s delivery team had walked the executive sponsor through an internal slide-deck mock-up of the planned dashboard, and the verdict had been blunt: the visual standard was nowhere near what the sponsor would accept for stakeholders at this level.
The brief that landed with GroupBWT was specific — a high-fidelity executive dashboard with visual wow in one working week.
| Service: | AI Prototyping |
|---|---|
| Industry: | Consulting |
| Year: | 2025 |
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"For us, the deadline is yesterday. Competitor pressure was real on the ground, and we had people pushing for us internally. The partner needed to move fast to protect their position before the conversation slipped, and the executive sponsor was the kind of person who decides on what they see, not what they read."
— Senior Manager, Consulting Partner.
"It's not about doing more screens. It's about less is more. Two or three views for the planning stage, that's the artefact that sells the idea. Everything else can wait until execution. All we need now is two to three screens, just to sell the idea."
— Partner, Consulting Partner
The Challenge: A Pre-Sale Pitch on a One-Week Clock
The sponsor wanted an executive dashboard at a visual standard the internal mock-up had not reached: monitoring across thousands of underlying projects, surfaced as something an executive at this level could read in seconds, not study. A real back-end in seven working days was never on the table. The artefact had to feel like an enterprise product on screen — drawn from a brief still half-defined on day one, with brand assets and scope landing only on day three. By mid-sprint, a conversational query screen was added to the scope as a way to make the dashboard feel like it could think.
Two to three weeks of design work was the realistic deliverable cadence for a brief this messy. The partner had less than a week. Whatever closed that gap had to come from somewhere other than more design hours.
From Brief to Clickable Executive Dashboard in Seven Working Days
Discovery, Day by Day
In seven working days, a client calls almost every day. Day one: programme scale, committee count, partner’s existing data sources. Day two: requirements. Day three: brand book and scope; mood references and layout variants explored through Midjourney and Galileo in parallel with the brand-book intake. Day four: first wireframes with a video walkthrough. By day six, a conversational query screen had been added to the scope, and the partner had cut the dashboard back from eight to ten screens to the two or three views the sponsor would actually use.
Figma as Visual Contract
A real back-end in seven days was impossible. We built a hybrid: Figma with deep state work — every number the dashboard could show, drawn manually for every scenario the sponsor would test — so the artefact behaved on screen as the live system would. The partner walked away with a high-fidelity demo they could put in front of an executive room without flinching.
Creating something that doesn't exist, something that would be functional and would look like an enterprise-level solution within a week — we're not the magicians. It's not possible. We did the part that was possible. We wrote down the path to the part that wasn't. That distinction was the artefact.
Three Views
Three views in the final prototype. An executive overview with programme health, Red/Amber/Green status across readiness phases, and critical-path alerts surfaced at a glance. A per-committee view with progress against plan, open action items, and pending decisions in one sweep. A conversational query screen, added to the scope mid-sprint, where the sponsor could ask “why is this committee delayed?” and read an answer back — a designed UX pattern showing how the sponsor would later interact with a thinking system, not a built model.
How AI Accelerated the Sprint
Seven working days left no room for sequential handoffs. AI tools compressed the work across multiple layers of the prototype. Design exploration ran through Midjourney and Galileo for layout variants and mood references, with Figma AI plugins and Diagram handling component suggestions and auto-layout work inside the file. Microcopy across the dashboard — chart labels, the answers in the conversational query screen, and the executive summary panels — was drafted with Claude and ChatGPT and edited to match the partner’s register.
Every number, status, and alert the sponsor would see on screen was populated with LLM-generated programme data, committee statuses, and risk flags — at a volume a hand-built dataset would have needed days to assemble. Icon sets and brand asset variations were generated and adapted in-file, without a separate asset production cycle. The result: a seven-day clock that a sequential design process would have needed two to three weeks to run.
Differentiation
A clickable Figma deliverable that survives a sponsor’s eyes — under daily scope shifts, with brand assets landing mid-week and views still unconfirmed on day three — is what an enterprise pre-sale needs when the partner’s first internal mock-up has already been rejected. Producing it for a sponsor on a seven-day clock is what an external prototyping partner is for. The win was not faster designers — it was AI tooling embedded across exploration, state mapping, and microcopy that closed a two-to-three-week gap into the partner’s seven-day window and produced an artefact that survived the standard the previous mock-up had failed.
A Seven-Day Sprint That Opened a Multi-Year Engagement Track
7 working days — discovery to clickable executive dashboard demo. 3 sprint deliverables — Figma file with deep state map, hosted clickable web demo, Loom walkthrough.
- The Figma file was retained by the partner as the reference for execution-stage planning.
- At handoff, the Partner’s feedback was direct: impressive output in a short amount of time — with specific design tweaks flagged for the next iteration.
- Pre-sale conversations carried into a multi-year proposal track covering dozens of use cases, role-based personas, and a long-term managed-services horizon.
Looking to Move a Pre-Sale Past a Stuck Sponsor?
We help consulting partners turn rejected mock-ups into clickable executive dashboard prototypes — high-fidelity artefacts that survive a sponsor's eyes inside one working week.
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