My Pod Planner

For four years, Gardyn owners had planned pod layouts in a community spreadsheet, returning every few weeks when their pods exhausted. Gardyn already gave them a plant catalog and a light map. What none of it could do was model the physical layout: which plant belongs in which light zone, and what to replant next. I designed a light-zone-aware planner that answers exactly that, what to plant, where to place it, and when to swap it.

My first instinct was to block bad placements: refuse to let a high-light plant sit in a low-light slot. The Reddit threads changed my mind. Owners routinely have more plants of one light level than slots for it, so blocking forces them to either misplace a plant or close the tab. I flag the consequence inline and let the user decide. That stance, the system informs, the person decides, then carried into auto-place recommendations, tips that stay until you dismiss them, and bolting warnings across the product.

A week-one deployment broke analytics and wiped a few early users’ saved layouts. I found the affected users by hand and reached out directly. AI accelerated implementation more than I expected, but production accountability stayed mine. Now anything touching user data, migrations, or analytics gets a code review, not just a UI check.