Real-time ops dashboard

The problem

An early-stage logistics startup was running their daily operations out of a sprawl of spreadsheets and Slack messages. It worked at ten orders a day and fell apart at a hundred. They needed a real product, fast, without hiring a team to build it.

(Client details anonymized at their request — the work is described as shipped.)

What I built

A real-time operational dashboard that became the team's single source of truth:

• Live data — Supabase Postgres with realtime subscriptions, so the floor and the office saw the same state without refreshing.
• Role-aware views — row-level security drove what each role could see and do, enforced in the database rather than the UI.
• Fast iteration — a Next.js front end I could ship changes to daily as we learned what the team actually needed versus what they'd asked for.

Outcome

The spreadsheets were retired within weeks. The team handled a multiple of their previous order volume on the same headcount, and onboarding a new operator went from a day of shadowing to an afternoon. The system was handed over with documentation so their first engineering hire could pick it up cleanly.

What I took from it

• Shipping something rough on day three beat shipping something polished on day thirty — the daily feedback loop is what got the design right.
• Modeling permissions in the database paid for itself the first time requirements changed.