A home-building franchise network selling $1.7B of homes a year ran on a desktop application written decades earlier, with spreadsheets filling the gaps. ~150 franchises across 5 countries — quotes, schedules and supplier orders living in a system nobody could reach from a building site. The obvious answer was to rebuild it in the cloud. The hard part was who would use it: franchise operators who build houses for a living, not software users. Many had run their office the same way for a decade and had no reason to trust a system that made their work more visible. Softeq took the rebuild as a fixed-price project with a sixteen-person team, and the client's Product Owner asked for me on the project by name. For three years I was the only designer on it, working alongside the business analysts — which meant every workflow decision, every screen and every argument about scope came through one person.