Prepare
Day 0 readiness checks, opening setup, dates, notes, and team roster.
New-store readiness product
The New Store Opening Portal
Coaches were using spreadsheets, paper, and personal notes to manage five-day openings. I defined the shared process and built the portal used to manage the agenda, evidence, sign-offs, daily recaps, and final review.
| Role | Process definition, requirements, application build, rollout, and iteration |
| Problem | No shared opening workflow or consistent method for recording readiness |
| Deliverable | A secure portal for the five-day agenda, competency evidence, sign-offs, recaps, partner review, and closeout |
| Result | Average readiness rose from a 56 historical baseline to 83.2 across the first five platform-supported openings |
The product
The day, the evidence, and the next decision
DashboardThe dashboard shows the current training day, scenario scores, completed sign-offs, launch timing, and learners who need follow-up.
The decisions it supports
New Store Opening events are short, operationally intense, and full of decisions that matter after the coach leaves. Coaches develop multiple trainees, document readiness, complete recurring reviews, coordinate with local leadership, and formally close the event with the franchise partner.
Before the portal, those activities had no single digital system. The organization needed shared answers to five questions: what coaches did each day, what trainees had to demonstrate, what the franchise partner confirmed, what leaders needed in the daily recap, and what evidence remained after closeout.
Defining readiness
No product or engineering team was assigned to the project. I worked directly with the opening process, defined the requirements, and built the application.
Readiness had to be recorded as observable performance, not attendance or confidence. That decision shaped the competency criteria, scenario assessments, sign-offs, daily recaps, partner confirmations, and the cross-opening comparison view.
How coaches use it
The portal follows the opening from Day 0 preparation through the five-day agenda, competency checks, partner review, and final export.
Facilitate
Five-day agenda, learning objectives, embedded coach guidance, and resources.
Verify
Per-trainee competency tracking, attendance, progress, and formal sign-offs.
Communicate
Structured daily recaps with a ready-to-share Slack preview.
Review
Partner checkpoints, leadership confirmation, and opening-weekend reporting.
Learn
Completed-opening history and administrative export for organizational review.
How the workflow works
Required evidence follows the agenda
Each training block identifies what the coach should explain, what the learner should practice, what the coach should observe, and what evidence should be recorded.
Access follows the assigned opening
The application uses Supabase authentication, Postgres, and database-level row security. Coaches work only with openings assigned to them, while administrators can review records across openings.
Preserved the integrity of formal confirmations
Stable record identifiers prevent duplicate checklist and sign-off entries. Names, dates, and first-confirmation timestamps create a more dependable operational history without silently replacing the original confirmation moment.
Designed for shared field devices
The portal includes a shared-iPad warning, prominent sign-out controls, automatic sign-out after inactivity, required-field validation, and guardrails that prevent actions from being recorded without an active opening.
Chose maintainability over unnecessary complexity
I built the front end in browser-native HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with Supabase as the managed backend and GitHub Pages for deployment. The codebase remains limited to browser-native files plus the managed backend, which I maintain without a separate engineering team.
The same measures are recorded for each opening
The portal records competency performance, readiness checks, scenario assessments, daily recaps, process-confusion escalations, formal confirmations, and opening outcomes. Those fields allow the same measures to be compared across openings.
How the system fits together
Field users
Coaches · administrators
New Store Opening Portal
Prepare · facilitate · verify · recap · close
Supabase
Authentication · Postgres · row security
Organizational view
Admin access · completed openings · CSV export
Sanitized architecture view · production configuration and identifiers omitted
“I have now completed three openings using the portal, and I genuinely would not want to run another opening without it… By the end of the opening, I know the work has been captured properly and that nothing important has disappeared into someone’s personal notes.”
NSO Coach · exact feedback-survey quotation
Readiness comparison
What the first five openings showed
56→83.2
Average readiness across the first five platform-supported openings
The historical baseline consolidates the 24 openings completed before the platform launched.
35%
Higher average technical readiness
Measured through secret-shop scoring, scenario-based assessments, and process-confusion escalation tickets.
28%
Higher operational and guest readiness
Measured through the same combined evidence: observed performance, scenario execution, and process-confusion escalations.
The comparison covers 24 historical openings and the first five openings supported by the portal. It shows an average difference during the initial rollout; it does not isolate the portal from the curriculum, coach guidance, or other changes introduced at the same time.
Readiness improvements are average changes observed across the first five portal-supported openings using the stated measurement sources.
What changed after launch
Field use led to shared-device protections, dual-party confirmations, planned-versus-actual date capture, variance notes, expanded setup, scorecards, and a broader administrative export.
Sign-offs, assessments, recaps, escalations, partner reviews, and opening outcomes now remain available after closeout. They can be reviewed when the curriculum, coach guidance, or readiness criteria are updated for a later opening.
Interactive product demo
Explore the portal
The production portal contains private employee and operational information. This public version recreates the product with entirely fictional people, locations, and opening details while preserving the core workflows and interaction design.
Move through readiness checks, the training agenda, coach guidance, competency sign-offs, daily recaps, partner review, opening closeout, and the cross-opening comparison view.
Explore the sanitized interactive demo