Proposal Writer
AI-drafted government proposals at Usul. Past work goes in, a compliant first pass comes out.
overview
Government proposals are long, compliance-heavy documents that small contracting teams often write without a dedicated proposal writer — in many companies, "everyone's the proposal writer." At Usul, I led the design of Proposal Writer: a tool that turns a company's past proposals, technical material, and opportunity context into a strong first pass, so teams spend their time refining strategy instead of staring at a blank compliance matrix.
the problem
Discovery calls with contracting teams kept surfacing the same shape of pain: the most time-consuming step after finding an opportunity is assembling the response — pulling from past submissions, coordinating technical volumes across teams, and keeping everything compliant with the solicitation. The raw material usually exists; it's scattered across old documents and inboxes.
the design
The experience is built around what teams already have. Users bring in past proposals — whole documents or individual sections — and anything else that should shape the draft, and the writer generates a structured first pass grounded in that material and the solicitation's requirements. From there the workflow is section-level: search across past proposals, regenerate and refine sections, and keep the compliance structure intact as the document evolves.
I designed and built the experience end to end — research, flows, interface, and frontend — and onboarded contracting teams personally, using each setup session as a usability study.
iteration
Proposal Writer v2 rebuilt the drafting pipeline and interface around what the first version taught us about how teams actually assemble responses — and its adoption drove the next question: everything around the writing (assignments, reviews, deadlines) still lived in scattered tools. That question became Capture Space.