The other showcases in this portfolio (Uncertainty as Signal, Volatility Surface, North Bridge, HR as DJ, What Gets Measured) all share the same underlying design problem: when a decision-maker misreads dense information, the consequence lands in capital, operating risk, or an irreversible call. The interface is the layer between the complexity and the decision.

This showcase is the earliest version of that problem in my practice. The original work was built for a platform that mapped organizational entities: companies, individuals, their attributes and relationships. Analysts could navigate through layers of data to find the specific connections that mattered for a given inquiry. The tool needed to handle hundreds of entities, dozens of relationship types, and the kind of investigative narrowing that starts with a document and ends with a name.

The design insight that drove the interaction model was this: the same person looks completely different depending on which view you are using to examine them. In a table, they are a row of attributes. In a treemap, they are a block of proportional weight inside a cluster. In a network graph, they are a node with a specific position in a topology: central, peripheral, or bridging. Each view answers a different question, and the right view depends on what kind of decision you are trying to make.

A manager assembling a team for a critical AI initiative is not trying to find the person with the highest skill score. They are trying to find the person who can pull the team together: who has the relationships across departments, who is trusted by the domain experts they need to recruit, who has worked with enough of the relevant people that the team will actually function once formed. That is a topology question, and it cannot be answered by sorting a table.

The three views were designed as a progressive narrowing sequence, not as independent navigation options. You start in the Roster because you do not yet know what you are looking for: you have a project brief and a rough sense of the skills it requires. The Roster shows you the full candidate space, sortable and filterable, but deliberately neutral about relative importance. Nothing is ranked because ranking at this stage would be premature.

You move to the Org Grid when you notice a pattern in the Roster that prompts a structural question: why are there so many relevant candidates in a department that has nothing to do with the initiative? The Grid is a treemap that shows you where those candidates sit in the organizational structure. Blocks are sized by match confidence. Drilling down reveals clusters of co-located expertise: teams that have already built the skill set you need, teams you may not have known existed.

You move to the Talent Network when the Org Grid has narrowed the candidate space to a cluster worth examining closely. The network shows the relationships between people: past projects, shared managers, co-authorship, collaboration history. Nodes are sized by connectivity. The hub node is the person you are actually looking for: not necessarily the one with the most skills, but the one who knows the most people in the cluster.

The hub discovery is the core interaction. In a force-directed graph, hub nodes naturally migrate toward the center as the physics simulation settles. The visual affordance is immediate and physical: the most connected person is at the center of the group. You do not need to run a centrality algorithm in your head. The topology makes it visible.

The shortlist mechanism closes the loop. Dragging a person from the network to the shortlist, or clicking the add button on their profile sheet, adds them to a persistent shortlist visible as a badge on the floating action button. The shortlist panel shows not just who is on it, but the coverage map: which skill clusters have been addressed, which remain open, and what the team’s network centrality looks like as a whole. A team of individually excellent people who have never worked together is a different risk profile than a team of slightly less skilled people with dense shared history.