How we hauled the gate open for larger companies

Our product at one time was fit well for small firms, but became more nightmarish the bigger they were.

Users would interface with their clients within Copilot; sending messages, sharing files, billing them, among other things. Straightforward as a small firm just getting around to establishing itself but say it had 10 users and each handled 20 clients. On our old paradigm, a user at this supposed firm would be exposed to 180 clients outside of their scope, they would drown in a sea of messages, files, folders, invoices and notifications! A UX issue that becomes an existential one once we remember that this exposed data may have been sensitive information the employee was not legally allowed to view.

A keen business problem, indeed barring us from any established firm with high user/client counts, or those with any intra-firm privileged information agreements. The software needed an overhaul to ensure good performance with such high loads of users, and the product team needed to update the UX paradigms to facilitate the client visibility issue.

It occurred to us that Linear had already solved our problem. We noted that tickets and clients were essentially the same as it regarded Linear and Copilot users, respectively. Hence, the solution was:
¬ If a user was set as Lead, they saw all clients and information.
¬ If a user was set as Assignee, they saw only the clients they were assigned to.

In our product, we chose not to surface assignee lingo as it was not needed for the feature to be understood and used well, with all these features falling under a nice *Visibility* selector for each client. Admins could set who they wanted as the default lead, but aside from those components, this feature was relatively invisible, betraying just how significant it was to our growth.