Case study · K-12 · Product pitch

MyGooru × Cascades

Role

Sole designer

Timeline

June 2026

Stack

React 19 · Vite 7 · Tailwind v4

Audience

Cascades product team

HERO IMAGE

Cover — the Program Leader Overview with the new Academic Progress column highlighted

Overview

A pitch artifact, not a user tool.

Cascades is a K-12 MTSS platform with rich behavior, discipline, attendance, and equity data — but no academic mastery data beyond a single GPA number. MyGooru fills exactly that gap. This prototype exists to pitch that integration to the Cascades product team.

Every screen had to answer one question: what can a Program Leader see now that they couldn't see in Cascades alone?

The first version went wide. The second version got honest.

The first build went wide: six different layout concepts, four job-archetype ideas, five separate pitch components, and a unified matrix crossing Cascades behavior data with MyGooru academic data by demographic.

That race matrix was the problem. Making it work meant inventing MyGooru-by-race numbers the organization doesn't actually have. The moment I noticed I was filling cells with plausible-looking values instead of real ones, I cut the whole matrix — and then cut everything else that wasn't load-bearing for the pitch.

"The moment I noticed I was filling cells with plausible-looking values, I cut the whole matrix."

— The realization

What ships

One card. One view. One stitch moment.

The final prototype ships one exported LeftCard and one PitchView. The entire pitch is a single stitch moment: add a "% Academic Progress" column next to the existing "% Behavior Progress" column in the Tier-3 Intervention Progress Monitor. Same roster, new column, same question a Program Leader is already asking.

ARTIFACT

Tier-3 Intervention Progress Monitor — existing Behavior Progress column next to the new Academic Progress column

Key decisions

Three calls that kept the pitch honest and legible.

Decision

Mirror Cascades faithfully

White cards on a light background, the same RYG tier pills, the same stacked demographic bars and simple tables Cascades already uses. The stitch moment is the only thing that should look new.

Decision

Real screenshot numbers only

Every number in the prototype — student counts, GPA, ODR, chronic absenteeism, Tier 3 program counts — comes directly from real Cascades screenshots, verifiable against their own product.

Decision

Query-param view switching

The pitch runs as a click-through deck via URL views (overview, rationale, script, pitch, program-leader, etc.) — shareable links, no slide deck required.

What I cut

Everything that wasn't load-bearing for one honest argument.

Six LeftCard layout variants. Four job-archetype concepts. Five separate pitch components. And the race matrix, along with the invented data it would have required. All of it stayed in the file tree as the negative case — visible evidence of what was tried and rejected, not deleted history.

Outcome

Not yet delivered. The discipline is the win.

The pitch hasn't been delivered to Cascades yet. The outcome that matters here isn't a metric — it's the discipline of the process: when the data doesn't exist, the right design move is to show less, not invent something that looks plausible.

Six variants and a race matrix cut down to one card and one honest column. The restraint is the deliverable.

The moment I noticed I was filling cells with plausible-looking values,
I cut the whole matrix.