Sabrina Staniewska

Case Study Mierz Wysoko

Strategy before screens Evidence-first design that secured a 50,000 zł grant.

Product detail

  • What

    Strategy + hi-fi prototype

    Role

    UX mentor & specialist

  • Tean

    4 people

    Sector

    NGO

Strategic Impact

Co-created the business model before a single screen was designed — securing a 50,000 zł Sektor 3.0 grant.

  • About Mierz Wysoko

    Mierz Wysoko is a Polish foundation supporting NGOs with financial management and accounting capacity. 2do2 was conceived as their answer to a widespread problem: small NGO teams juggling multiple grants in Excel, with no dedicated accountant and no room for error. I joined as UX mentor and specialist, working alongside a four-person team to shape the product from business model through to a tested hi-fi prototype — securing a 50,000 zł Sektor 3.0 grant along the way.

  • Problem space

    120,000 NGOs in Poland. 60% struggling with accounting. 94% without a dedicated accountant. Teams overwhelmed by multi-grant reconciliation, working in insecure, error-prone Excel files with no change history and no cross-project visibility

    Research Setup

    30-minute exploratory interviews with the people who actually build and reconcile grant budgets — board members, project coordinators, and reconciliation leads across six organisations (five distinct; two shared staff and process under separate project names). Structured around role and process, pain points and their frequency, tooling history, and openness to a new system. Closed with hands-on tasks — walking through document intake and report generation live, where possible.

Strategy

Budgets balance exactly once — at creation.

Reframed the question from "will you buy this" to "what would make trying this feel safe." Three moves followed directly from the research: lead with a working demo rather than a pitch, since showing simplicity was the only way past "I don't know"; offer core functionality free at launch, to build trust with a sector that had never adopted a paid system; and treat security as the differentiator, not a feature — a direct answer to the one concern every hesitant organisation raised without being asked.

Solution

A tool organised around jobs, not accounting jargon — Projects, Budget, Tasks, and Accountant replace ledger terminology that assumed knowledge most users didn't have. An Excel import step inside the Add Project wizard let teams bring their existing budgets in rather than starting from zero, lowering the switching cost the research flagged as the real barrier. A one-click accountant handoff replaced the file-export-email-follow-up-call cycle every organisation described. And a cross-project, colour-coded calendar gave teams something Excel structurally couldn't: every grant's deadlines visible at once, in one place.

Tech Approach

Web-based delivery, weighed explicitly against on-premise rather than chosen by default: faster iteration, remote support, and live analytics against the sector's stated anxiety about constant network dependence and data exposure — the same concern the research surfaced as the deciding factor. Bootstrap-based front end for a drag-and-drop-configurable admin layer; PHP/Symfony backend on a relational database, with Redis managing shared session state across load-balanced servers and Jasper Reports powering the report set. PHP's cost and hiring advantage was weighed against its quality-consistency risk in the market — a trade-off made visible, not assumed away.

Built for the 94% without a dedicated accountant

  • Explain the idea

    Dashboard, Projects, Budget, Calendar, Contractors — mapped to how coordinators actually think about their day, not to accounting terminology they never asked to learn.

  • One glance, not one spreadshe

    The home dashboard surfaces own-contribution status, upcoming project end dates, and a per-category usage diagram — the at-a-glance view no amount of Excel setup could produce.

  • One master budget

    A single view aggregating every grant across the organisation — the thing every coordinator described needing and none could build for themselves.

  • Costs that split cleanly

    Contractor and cost records built for one-to-many splitting: a single cost divides across multiple projects with running totals. Contractor identity data — name, address, PESEL, bank account — can be edited but never deleted once tied to a project, preserving the audit trail.

  • A calendar that counts down

    A two-week view paired with a live countdown to each project's settlement deadline, so deadlines are seen coming rather than discovered late.

  • Reports they actually asked for

    Current grant balance, contracted hours worked, full organisational budget, per-grant usage, own-contribution tracking — five reports mapped directly to what organisations said they needed, not what a generic template offered.

Full discovery-to-specification cycle: exploratory research, strategic reframing, tested prototype, and a 58-page functional specification that secured 50,000 zł in funding before development began.

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Sabrina Staniewska

Sabrina Staniewska

Case Study Mierz Wysoko

Strategy before screens Evidence-first design that secured a 50,000 zł grant.

Product detail

  • What

    Strategy + hi-fi prototype

    Role

    UX mentor & specialist

  • Tean

    4 people

    Sector

    NGO

Strategic Impact

Co-created the business model before a single screen was designed — securing a 50,000 zł Sektor 3.0 grant.

  • About Mierz Wysoko

    Mierz Wysoko is a Polish foundation supporting NGOs with financial management and accounting capacity. 2do2 was conceived as their answer to a widespread problem: small NGO teams juggling multiple grants in Excel, with no dedicated accountant and no room for error. I joined as UX mentor and specialist, working alongside a four-person team to shape the product from business model through to a tested hi-fi prototype — securing a 50,000 zł Sektor 3.0 grant along the way.

  • Problem space

    120,000 NGOs in Poland. 60% struggling with accounting. 94% without a dedicated accountant. Teams overwhelmed by multi-grant reconciliation, working in insecure, error-prone Excel files with no change history and no cross-project visibility

    Research Setup

    30-minute exploratory interviews with the people who actually build and reconcile grant budgets — board members, project coordinators, and reconciliation leads across six organisations (five distinct; two shared staff and process under separate project names). Structured around role and process, pain points and their frequency, tooling history, and openness to a new system. Closed with hands-on tasks — walking through document intake and report generation live, where possible.

Strategy

Budgets balance exactly once — at creation.

Reframed the question from "will you buy this" to "what would make trying this feel safe." Three moves followed directly from the research: lead with a working demo rather than a pitch, since showing simplicity was the only way past "I don't know"; offer core functionality free at launch, to build trust with a sector that had never adopted a paid system; and treat security as the differentiator, not a feature — a direct answer to the one concern every hesitant organisation raised without being asked.

Solution

A tool organised around jobs, not accounting jargon — Projects, Budget, Tasks, and Accountant replace ledger terminology that assumed knowledge most users didn't have. An Excel import step inside the Add Project wizard let teams bring their existing budgets in rather than starting from zero, lowering the switching cost the research flagged as the real barrier. A one-click accountant handoff replaced the file-export-email-follow-up-call cycle every organisation described. And a cross-project, colour-coded calendar gave teams something Excel structurally couldn't: every grant's deadlines visible at once, in one place.

Tech Approach

Web-based delivery, weighed explicitly against on-premise rather than chosen by default: faster iteration, remote support, and live analytics against the sector's stated anxiety about constant network dependence and data exposure — the same concern the research surfaced as the deciding factor. Bootstrap-based front end for a drag-and-drop-configurable admin layer; PHP/Symfony backend on a relational database, with Redis managing shared session state across load-balanced servers and Jasper Reports powering the report set. PHP's cost and hiring advantage was weighed against its quality-consistency risk in the market — a trade-off made visible, not assumed away.

Built for the 94% without a dedicated accountant

Every organisation we interviewed described the same gap. None of them could close it in Excel.

  • Explain the idea

    Dashboard, Projects, Budget, Calendar, Contractors — mapped to how coordinators actually think about their day, not to accounting terminology they never asked to learn.

  • One glance, not one spreadshe

    The home dashboard surfaces own-contribution status, upcoming project end dates, and a per-category usage diagram — the at-a-glance view no amount of Excel setup could produce.

  • One master budget

    A single view aggregating every grant across the organisation — the thing every coordinator described needing and none could build for themselves.

  • Costs that split cleanly

    Contractor and cost records built for one-to-many splitting: a single cost divides across multiple projects with running totals. Contractor identity data — name, address, PESEL, bank account — can be edited but never deleted once tied to a project, preserving the audit trail.

  • A calendar that counts down

    A two-week view paired with a live countdown to each project's settlement deadline, so deadlines are seen coming rather than discovered late.

  • Reports they actually asked for

    Current grant balance, contracted hours worked, full organisational budget, per-grant usage, own-contribution tracking — five reports mapped directly to what organisations said they needed, not what a generic template offered.

Full discovery-to-specification cycle: exploratory research, strategic reframing, tested prototype, and a 58-page functional specification that secured 50,000 zł in funding before development began.

See All

Next project -->

Sabrina Staniewska

Sabrina Staniewska

Case Study Mierz Wysoko

Strategy before screens Evidence-first design that secured a 50,000 zł grant.

Product detail

  • What

    Strategy + hi-fi prototype

    Role

    UX mentor & specialist

  • Tean

    4 people

    Sector

    NGO

Strategic Impact

Co-created the business model before a single screen was designed — securing a 50,000 zł Sektor 3.0 grant.

  • About Mierz Wysoko

    Mierz Wysoko is a Polish foundation supporting NGOs with financial management and accounting capacity. 2do2 was conceived as their answer to a widespread problem: small NGO teams juggling multiple grants in Excel, with no dedicated accountant and no room for error. I joined as UX mentor and specialist, working alongside a four-person team to shape the product from business model through to a tested hi-fi prototype — securing a 50,000 zł Sektor 3.0 grant along the way.

  • Problem space

    120,000 NGOs in Poland. 60% struggling with accounting. 94% without a dedicated accountant. Teams overwhelmed by multi-grant reconciliation, working in insecure, error-prone Excel files with no change history and no cross-project visibility

    Research Setup

    30-minute exploratory interviews with the people who actually build and reconcile grant budgets — board members, project coordinators, and reconciliation leads across six organisations (five distinct; two shared staff and process under separate project names). Structured around role and process, pain points and their frequency, tooling history, and openness to a new system. Closed with hands-on tasks — walking through document intake and report generation live, where possible.

Key Research Findings

  • Strategic
    Budgets balance exactly once — at creation.

    Every organisation described the same arc: a budget built to close cleanly, followed by an ongoing scramble of 10% internal transfers and grant addenda to keep reality aligned with a document that was never built to flex.

  • Must Fix
    Reconciliation runs on one person's memory, not a system

    In every organisation, a single person held the knowledge of what connected to what. Where that person was an off-site, part-time accountant working on a quarterly cadence, reconciliation stalled with them — sometimes for months.

  • Context Finding
    Openness to a new tool was conditional, not enthusiastic.

    Most answered "I don't know" when asked if they'd adopt a dedicated system — not resistance, but the absence of a mental model for what "simple" would look like. Trust would have to be built, not assumed.

Strategy

Budgets balance exactly once — at creation.

Reframed the question from "will you buy this" to "what would make trying this feel safe." Three moves followed directly from the research: lead with a working demo rather than a pitch, since showing simplicity was the only way past "I don't know"; offer core functionality free at launch, to build trust with a sector that had never adopted a paid system; and treat security as the differentiator, not a feature — a direct answer to the one concern every hesitant organisation raised without being asked.

Solution

A tool organised around jobs, not accounting jargon — Projects, Budget, Tasks, and Accountant replace ledger terminology that assumed knowledge most users didn't have. An Excel import step inside the Add Project wizard let teams bring their existing budgets in rather than starting from zero, lowering the switching cost the research flagged as the real barrier. A one-click accountant handoff replaced the file-export-email-follow-up-call cycle every organisation described. And a cross-project, colour-coded calendar gave teams something Excel structurally couldn't: every grant's deadlines visible at once, in one place.

Tech Approach

Web-based delivery, weighed explicitly against on-premise rather than chosen by default: faster iteration, remote support, and live analytics against the sector's stated anxiety about constant network dependence and data exposure — the same concern the research surfaced as the deciding factor. Bootstrap-based front end for a drag-and-drop-configurable admin layer; PHP/Symfony backend on a relational database, with Redis managing shared session state across load-balanced servers and Jasper Reports powering the report set. PHP's cost and hiring advantage was weighed against its quality-consistency risk in the market — a trade-off made visible, not assumed away.

Built for the 94% without a dedicated accountant

Every organisation we interviewed described the same gap. None of them could close it in Excel.

  • Navigation by job, not by ledger

    Dashboard, Projects, Budget, Calendar, Contractors — mapped to how coordinators actually think about their day, not to accounting terminology they never asked to learn.

  • One glance, not one spreadshe

    The home dashboard surfaces own-contribution status, upcoming project end dates, and a per-category usage diagram — the at-a-glance view no amount of Excel setup could produce.

  • One master budget

    A single view aggregating every grant across the organisation — the thing every coordinator described needing and none could build for themselves.

  • Costs that split cleanly

    Contractor and cost records built for one-to-many splitting: a single cost divides across multiple projects with running totals. Contractor identity data — name, address, PESEL, bank account — can be edited but never deleted once tied to a project, preserving the audit trail.

  • A calendar that counts down

    A two-week view paired with a live countdown to each project's settlement deadline, so deadlines are seen coming rather than discovered late.

  • Reports they actually asked for

    Current grant balance, contracted hours worked, full organisational budget, per-grant usage, own-contribution tracking — five reports mapped directly to what organisations said they needed, not what a generic template offered.

Full discovery-to-specification cycle: exploratory research, strategic reframing, tested prototype, and a 58-page functional specification that secured 50,000 zł in funding before development began.

See All

Next project -->