We built a B2B SaaS dashboard in 6 weeks. Here's how.
A client came to us with a clean brief, a tight budget, and six weeks. Here is how we scoped, designed, and shipped a fully functional B2B analytics dashboard, on time.
The brief was unusually clean: a logistics software company needed an analytics dashboard for their enterprise clients. They had data, they had users, and they had no internal product team. They had six weeks before a contract renewal meeting where they needed to demo it live.
We started week one with two days of scoping. Not wireframes. Just decisions. What data matters most to their end users? What actions should be possible from the dashboard? What does success look like for the demo? Scoping that tight forces you to make real choices early, which is exactly what you want on a constrained timeline.
The data model was straightforward: shipment volumes, delivery performance, exceptions, and trends over time. We designed the component library before any screens: a set of chart components, stat cards, and table patterns that could be composed quickly without revisiting design decisions on every screen.
Engineering started in parallel at day four. Backend: a lightweight API pulling from their existing data warehouse, with a caching layer so the dashboard could handle concurrent enterprise users. Frontend: React with a custom chart abstraction over Recharts, keeping the visual language consistent without locking us into a charting library's default aesthetics.
Week four was integration. The data was messier than the brief suggested: missing fields, timezone inconsistencies, some metrics that needed backfilling. We flagged these to the client, scoped exactly what could be fixed before launch, and shipped the rest with graceful empty states rather than blocking on perfect data.
Demo day: the client walked their enterprise customers through the dashboard live. Three of the five said they'd want access immediately. The contract renewed. For us, the lesson was the same one we keep re-learning: a constrained timeline with a clear definition of done is almost always faster than an open-ended project with flexible scope.