Planda Portal
A production platform for preparing, validating, submitting, and tracking UK planning applications.
Planda Portal turned a placement into a lesson in product ownership: a planning workflow only becomes useful when its rules, interfaces, evidence, and operation agree.
The situation.
Preparing a UK planning application is a conditional, document-heavy process. Planda Portal gives applicants a route for checking council requirements, validating an application before submission, submitting it, and following its status afterwards.
I joined Serac Group on a placement at a moment when the product had to translate planning rules and operational realities into an applicant-facing experience. The public launch post describes the intended audience as applicants, agents, and councils; the placement work made the gap between a clean feature description and a dependable real workflow very visible.
What I did.
As Product Owner, I worked across research, requirements, interface design, engineering, QA, release, analytics, and post-launch iteration. I delivered the work with colleagues across product, engineering, sales, and operations at Serac Group.
The placement made me a translator between planning-domain questions, implementation constraints, and what people could understand at the point of use. It taught me to follow a decision through the entire product rather than treating discovery, delivery, testing, and support as separate jobs.
Inside Planda Portal.
Screens from Planda Portal's public applicant journey show application setup, progress tracking, document checks, and review status.
Starting an application
The first step asks for a plain-language project proposal and application type so Planda Portal can establish the right journey and calculate the correct fee.
Image source: Planda Portal
Keeping a long application understandable
The application workspace makes progress visible across the required forms, helping applicants see what is complete and what still needs attention.
Image source: Planda Portal
Catching missing documents
The application workspace identifies a missing required document and flags issues found in an uploaded file so the applicant knows what to resolve before submission.
Image source: Planda Portal
Following document review
Uploaded plans are grouped by document type and given a clear review status, so applicants can see which files are waiting for Planda's checks.
Image source: Planda PortalHow the work unfolded.
Map rules across the journey
Worked on product work that connected application questions, documents, validation, review, generated outputs, and submission rather than treating each screen as an isolated form.
Make quality part of delivery
Contributed to QA and end-to-end testing around real applicant journeys, where the useful unit of confidence was a complete state transition rather than an attractive individual screen.
Stay with the product after launch
Used feedback, operational conversations, and product signals as prompts for investigation and iteration. A metric or a support report was evidence to inspect, not automatic proof of a cause.
What happened.
Planda Portal launched on 16 February 2026 as a complete route from preparing an application to validating it, submitting it, and following its progress. By launch, the applicant experience was connected to generated documents, payments, council workflows, internal operations, and the rules that determine whether an application is ready to submit.
I took the product from scoping into launch and post-launch development as its Product Owner. I owned 22 PRDs and jointly owned six more, introduced end-to-end browser testing for complete applicant journeys, helped move that suite from Puppeteer to Playwright, and built PostHog insights around activation, draft-to-submission conversion, payments, validation, application views, and council usage.
After launch, I helped run the release cadence, prepared product updates, reviewed feedback and bugs, and used product data to shape what came next. That included the validator beta rollout, roadmap prioritisation, and early work on later product surfaces such as Planda V2 reports and Snapshot Reports.
What I learned.
Correctness crosses boundaries
In a rule-heavy product, a change can affect forms, documents, review, submission, support, and measurement at once. Product thinking has to follow that path.
Launch changes the question
After release, the work shifts from whether a feature can ship to whether real people understand it, recover from errors, and receive a reliable outcome.
Product ownership is collaborative
Owning the product direction meant connecting specialists, decisions, and feedback across the team, not trying to do every discipline alone.
Related links.
Repositories, demos, event pages, posts, and other places connected to this project.
- Planda Portal: public product siteCurrent product, applicant journey, and service information.
- Planda Portal launch: Waseef Mohammad Khan on LinkedInMy Product Owner contribution and the February 2026 launch.
- Planda Portal launch: Brandon Johnson on LinkedInTeam/product launch context.
- Placement-year reflectionMy wider product, engineering, and placement experience at Serac Group.