Ayush Jain
Product Case Study

Stop Drawing Rectangles.
Start Managing Dependencies.

Why I envisioned Nexus Plan: A program roadmap tool that prioritizes logic over layout, saving Program Managers from "PowerPoint Purgatory."

Nexus Plan

Try Nexus Plan

Open source, built with React + Vite, and ready for your next big program launch.

The "Why"

The job of a Program Manager is often reduced to "Box Moving." You spend hours in PowerPoint or Excel, manually resizing shapes because the Backend team delayed their API by one week.

Existing tools fall into two traps:

  • Too Simple (Miro/PPT): Great for visuals, but zero logic. If Task A moves, Task B stays put, creating a "lie" on your roadmap.
  • Too Complex (MS Project/Jira): Data graveyards. They require so much configuration that nobody updates them, leading to stale data.

"We need a tool that thinks like a Program Manager: Aware of dependencies, sensitive to risks, but simple enough to use in a boardroom."

The "What"

Nexus Plan is an interactive, dependency-aware roadmap engine built with React. It automates the tedious parts of scheduling so you can focus on the strategy.

Dynamic Timeline
Seamlessly toggle between Week view (execution) and Quarter view (strategy).
Live Risk Detection
The system calculates slippage in real-time. If a task pushes past the deadline, it glows red.

Product Highlights

1

Elastic Dependencies

In most tools, lines are just drawings. In Nexus Plan, they are physics.
If you drag a "Blocker" task forward, every dependent task across every component shifts automatically. It prevents the "impossible schedule" fallacy.

2

The "Tetris" Layout Engine

Stop manually adjusting vertical spacing. Our custom layout engine analyzes overlapping tasks and automatically stacks them into lanes, ensuring nothing ever hides behind another task. It's clean by default.

3

Draft & Commit Mode

Adding complex components shouldn't be stressful. We built a "Draft Mode" that lets you stage components, activities, and milestones before committing them to the roadmap.

Recommended Future Capabilities

AI Risk Prediction

Train machine learning models on historical project data to flag "Watermelon" statuses (Green on outside, Red on inside) before they delay launch.

Bi-Directional Sync

Real-time integration with Jira and Azure DevOps. Move a card in Nexus Plan, and the corresponding Epic or Feature updates instantly.

Resource Heatmaps

Overlay capacity data on top of the timeline to spot bottlenecks where a single Principal Engineer is blocking three critical paths.

Natural Language Scheduling

"Shift the Backend migration by 2 weeks." Type it into a command bar, and watch the entire dependency chain adjust automatically.

Prototype Status: This project is a thought experiment in progress. The code provided is a prototype to demonstrate the product mindset and layout engine logic. It is not a fully activated SaaS product and may contain bugs or incomplete features.

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