The full story
Where it went wrong
Our client is the regional partner of an international brand, running three markets in Asia. One of them moves very fast: store openings, local collections, campaigns, events. Headquarters sits on another continent.
Updates travelled the usual way, through chats, emails and calls. That works until it doesn't. A few designs were approved by people who didn't actually have the authority. A store build went ahead on a look HQ had never signed off. The founders found out after the fact, and they were not happy.
Nobody was hiding anything. There was just no single place where the whole picture lived.
The obvious fixes weren't great
The usual answer is to buy a project management tool or start a weekly slide deck. Both have problems. A new tool means new logins, onboarding and licences for people in different countries, and it is built for someone else's workflow. Decks take days to put together and are outdated by the time anyone opens them.
What the founders actually needed was simpler: one place, once a month, where they could see everything and know exactly what needed their decision.
What we built instead
A small, private website that works like a monthly report. The home page is a simple list of months. Open one, and you get:
- A short executive summary at the top, five or six bullets
- A section for each market, with store openings, collections, campaigns and events, mostly photos and one-liners
- What's coming in the next 30 days
- Decisions needed from HQ, and only the ones that truly need them
Regional teams open the page, type their updates and drag photos straight in. The site resizes images on its own, copies last month's structure so nobody starts from a blank page, and lets two people edit at the same time without overwriting each other. One password lets you read, a second one lets you edit. That's it.
The rule that makes it work
The sign-off section only covers the main pieces happening that month, not every work in progress.
Leadership gets a short list of real decisions instead of a feed of everything. That focus is what stops the wrong person from approving the big stuff.
Why building it beat buying it
This is the part worth paying attention to. A year or two ago, a custom internal platform meant a developer, a budget and a few months. Here, we described what the founders needed in plain words, and Claude built it with us in days.
The result fits exactly how this brand reports. It has the sections leadership actually reads, in the brand's own look, with no features nobody uses. It runs on Cloudflare's free hosting, so the running cost is zero. And because it's theirs, changing it later is a conversation, not a support ticket.
You don't need another subscription for every internal problem. You can build exactly the tool your team needs.
What to take from this
Most alignment problems aren't people problems. They're "where does this information live" problems. If your teams are spread across countries and leadership keeps hearing about things too late, give them one shared place with a clear rhythm and a clear list of what needs sign-off.
And before you buy software to fix it, ask whether you could simply build the version that fits you. With AI, the answer is now often yes.