Capture Space
Usul's system of record for government contracts. Everything from finding the work to submitting it.
overview
Capture Space is Usul's answer to what happens after a team finds an opportunity: the gate reviews, collaboration, and coordination it takes to actually win the contract. I'm leading its design — an ongoing effort to turn Usul from an opportunity-discovery tool into the enterprise platform where the entire capture process lives.
the problem
Teams identify opportunities on Usul, then leave. The capture process that follows — gate reviews, inviting engineers, assigning sections, tracking deadlines — scatters across Slack, Teams, and email, with no system of record. The incumbent tooling is generic CRM bent out of shape for government capture; teams tolerate it rather than like it.
discovery
I grounded the design in exploratory discussions with contracting teams, walking their end-to-end process from identification through go/no-go to proposal kickoff: where the process breaks down, how collaboration with engineering actually works, how feedback is tracked through reviews, and whether teams follow formal capture methodologies like Shipley or their own internal process. Established capture frameworks — color-team reviews, gate checklists — became reference material for what the structured path should feel like.
the design direction
The design centers on making the opportunity itself the workspace: collaborators invited onto an opportunity with scoped access, comments and notes in context, tasks and assignments with deadlines and reminders, and version history for the proposal itself — closer to how engineers think about source control than how sales tools think about pipelines. The goal is blunt: teams should hate their CRM and love Usul.
Capture Space is in active development — this page will grow as it ships.