FYUZ · SPARKT · PRODUCT VISION
How I rethought a rigid, physical goal-setting method into something people could actually use in software
My Role
Product Designer: visual representation, vision, information architecture, and end-to-end design of system and platform UX.
Type
Concept/vision and usable digital representation
Timeline
3 months
Context
Fyuz was a vision for connecting a company’s goals to what each person actually does and personally aims for, using the Harada Method, a Japanese goal-breakdown framework, as its backbone. The challenge was never the idea. It was translating a structured, paper-based methodology into a digital product that felt intuitive rather than diagrammatic.
I was brought onto this project specifically to solve that translation problem, after an earlier attempt hadn’t gotten there. This case study is about that reframing.
Shelved — Build halted due to an infrastructure disruption affecting the Dubai-hosted database
A platform for connecting company goals to individual growth.
What Fyuz was
Fyuz is a B2B platform built by Sparkt to help organisations turn shared goals into individual action. Employees adopt company and team goals, then define their own breakthroughs and tasks underneath them, with progress always flowing upward, from task to org, never assigned top-down.
The Harada Method, briefly
The Harada Method breaks one larger goal into breakthroughs, each supported by smaller tasks, traditionally laid out as a fixed 8×8 grid, or “64-chart.” It’s a genuinely good way to think about a goal. The question was whether its paper format needed to become its digital format too.
A real Harada chart: Shohei Ohtani filled one out at 16. Center goal "be the #1 draft pick of 8 pro teams," eight breakthroughs around it (body, control, speed, mentality, even "luck": pick up trash, greetings), each broken into eight tasks. Sixty-four cells on paper. This is exactly the artifact we had to translate.
Learn more about Harada method used by the famous baseball player Shohei Ohtani to achieve his ambitions here.
Project status
Vision presented and reviewed internally. Development was later halted due to an infrastructure disruption, caused by war, affecting the Dubai-hosted database, so the product never reached launch. This case study focuses on the design challenge: transforming the rigid Harada 64 Chart into an interactive digital experience without losing its underlying methodology.
The method was structured. The screen didn’t have to be.
Before I joined, an earlier attempt at Fyuz had stalled. The core issue wasn’t visual polish, it was representation. The 64-chart had been carried into the product almost exactly as it exists on paper: a literal grid of identical cells.
The chart, digitised literally
Every cell is an identical “Breakthroughs & Tasks” box. No differentiation, no hierarchy, the grid paper became the interface.
A chart, failing to represent exact connections
This version fails at correctly representing which breakthroughs are connected to which goals.
So I reframed the problem:
Instead of digitising the 64 cells, how might we digitise the relationships between them?
I stopped asking how to digitise the 64 cells and started asking how to digitise the relationships.
Before designing anything, I spent time understanding the Harada Method itself: the purpose behind each layer, why the framework works on paper, and what an organisation and an individual each actually need from it. That’s where the reframe came from.
Conventional assumption
“A 64-chart should become a 64-cell digital grid.”
Preserve the physical layout, and the methodology comes with it for free.
The logic needs to survive. The representation can evolve.
A goal, its breakthroughs, and its tasks are a set of relationships, not a spreadsheet. Software can show relationships spatially, through focus and proximity, instead of through a dense matrix.
One chain, two experiences.
Every part of Fyuz sits somewhere on this chain. Keeping it visible was the anchor for every screen that followed.
Before committing to a spatial canvas, I checked it could actually hold up.
The 64-chart naturally suggested a visual canvas, but a canvas alone could quickly become overwhelming. I explored different interaction models and prototypes in Vercel's V0 to understand how users could navigate the framework without losing context. The focus was on making complexity progressive rather than presenting everything at once.
Flexible Connectors
Bendable, flexible connectors let you use the whole board without fear of breaking the connection between two elements.
Details appear on click
Detail cards appear and float around the parent on click. Here, tasks float around the breakthrough you click.
Grab and place anywhere
Use the board to its full extent. Grab and place cards anywhere without losing their connection to the parent.
This step mattered because a canvas metaphor is easy to sketch and easy to get wrong in practice. Testing the interaction directly, not just describing it, is what turned “spatial and connected” from a nice idea into something I could commit to.
One or more goals in focus at the centre; its breakthroughs and tasks connected around it, with room for notes and media. The prototype behaviour, now expressed as the real product surface, relationships shown spatially, not as a 64-cell matrix.
Keeping personal ownership and organisational rollup from cancelling each other out.
This is the hardest problem in Fyuz, and the one I’m proudest of resolving. It has nothing to do with visual design.
The problem
Breakthroughs are personal. An individual writes their own title and description for how they’ll contribute to a goal. But leadership needs to see aggregate progress across an org goal. If every employee free-types their own wording with no shared structure, there’s nothing to roll up: “improve project planning,” “standardise project planning,” and “make delivery more predictable” might be the exact same intent, invisible to each other in a dashboard.
The decision
Breakthroughs exist only at the individual level. Org and Team spaces hold goals only and never breakthroughs directly. Their progress is derived upward from the individuals who adopted them, never self-reported at the org or team level. When someone creates a breakthrough under an adopted org or team goal, the system AI reads their title and description and suggests a shared category, with social context attached, like “3 colleagues have breakthroughs under Health”, so they can align to a common label or keep their own. Purely personal goals are never touched by this; the categorisation only applies where organisational visibility is actually needed.
Employee A’s breakthrough is “developing abs and core strength.” Employee B’s is “losing weight and increasing endurance.” Different intents, personally worded, system AI reads both and places them under a shared “Health” category, so leadership sees traction on the theme without either person losing their own definition of it.
Why this matters
Alignment shouldn’t require uniformity. Two people can work toward the same organisational breakthrough while defining it differently, on their own timeline, in their own words and the organisation still gets a real, aggregable signal. That’s the difference between a goal tool that turns into corporate bureaucracy and one that actually respects the person using it.
A breakthrough starts personal
The individual writes their own title and description, and chooses whether it’s shared with the organisation. Purely personal goals never leave My Space.
…then aligns to a shared category
When it is shared, the system AI reads the intent and proposes a common category with social context, so the org can categorise without flattening how each person defined it.
AI does the semantic work at exactly this point, reading intent and proposing where a breakthrough belongs. It’s assistance around the model, not the model itself: the core idea is the interaction and the roll up logic, not the AI.
The strategic layer: where the organisation says where it’s going.
The organisation’s question: “What are we trying to achieve?” An Org Head defines up to five goals, a cap that applies org-wide, and only to Org and Team-level goals, so it stays a forcing function for focus rather than an artificial ceiling on personal ambition. Each goal is validated against SMART criteria before it can be tracked.
Adoption is required, not optional
Every employee must adopt at least one Org goal and at least one Team goal, as-is. This is what keeps the “shared strategic lens” real. An org’s stated direction only means something if it’s actually connected to the people executing it.
Oversight without micromanagement
Org Heads can track and drill into adoption & check which teams and individuals have taken up a goal, and how their linked breakthroughs are progressing, so they can intervene where it’s warranted, without needing to author every layer beneath their own goals.
One org goal, seen from the top
Alignment, impact, and how many teams and people have adopted the goal, progress derived upward from individuals, alongside a plain-language leadership signal. Sample data shown; there is no real usage behind these figures.
Each org goal carries adoption, timeline, progress and a health label. The org-wide cap of five made tangible rather than documented.
Every person who adopted the goal, their progress, and where they’re slipping, the aggregate is always traceable back to real contribution.
The same goals as an estimated completion timeline, so leadership can read pace without asking anyone to self-report.
The personal layer: where the individual decides how they contribute.
The individual’s question: “How am I contributing to it?” My Space is where employees turn their adopted or personal goals into their own breakthroughs and tasks. They can create up to 8 breakthroughs across all their goals, distributed as needed. One goal might have three, while another has one. Each goal must have at least one breakthrough, and each breakthrough can contain up to 8 tasks.
Completion means maintenance, not a finish line
An employee adopts an org or team goal as-is, then builds their own breakthroughs beneath it. The link between strategy and personal work is required, not suggested.
Personal and adopted goals pass a SMART check before they can be tracked, so what enters the system is measurable from the start.
A breakthrough’s progress, performance and task split in one view. Reaching 100% moves it into continuous improvement rather than marking it done.
Same skeleton, different question, depending on who’s looking.
A manager and an individual are looking at the same underlying data, but they need it to answer completely different questions. Re-framing microcopy and not rebuilding the interface is what makes both experiences feel like they belong to the person using them.
Manager / Org Head
“How are they doing?”
Individual
“What should I do next?”
Ownership and momentum, reframed from the same fields, “Your Momentum,” “AI Coach Insight,” “Also adopted by 24 colleagues.”
A complex methodology became a product vision that could be understood, explored, and presented.
Representation
Moved from a literal 8×8 grid to a focused, spatial canvas that shows one goal and its relationships at a time.
System, not screens
A single mental model: Goal → Breakthrough → Task, serving both the organisation’s strategic view and the individual’s My Space.
The hard problem, solved
A mechanism that keeps individual ownership and organisational rollup from cancelling each other out.
This was a vision, not a shipped product, there’s no adoption data, no usage numbers, and nothing here implies otherwise. Its value is in the quality of the design solution: a difficult, unconventional framework made into a coherent, presentable interaction model.
I question the representation, not just the interface
The 64-chart didn’t need to become 64 digital cells. Recognising that the physical format and the underlying logic were two different things is what unlocked everything else.
I think in systems
Every screen had to answer to one chain: Organisation → Goal → Individual → Breakthrough → Task, rather than being designed in isolation.
I use inspiration as raw material
Spatial thinking from tools like FigJam, modular hierarchy from Notion, shared-context patterns from Slack, combined and adapted to Harada’s specific structure, not copied from any one of them.
I can work with ambiguity
This was a vision, not a validated product. The job was to build a coherent direction anyway, without pretending the uncertainty wasn’t there.
The final direction moved the Harada Method from a static 64-cell framework into a connected digital system. The work involved more than translating an existing methodology into UI. It required information architecture, interaction design, systems thinking, prototyping and product thinking to determine what the digital experience should actually be.
The goal wasn’t to make the 64-chart look digital. It was to make the thinking behind it work digitally.