Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill all 61 boards, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Mature, Ana and Karim redraw the office web app before adding recurring contracts, because dispatchers cannot find the parts stock anymore.
What the team took away
Parts stock moves from a buried settings tab to the Company section, and recurring contracts get their own page under Customers instead of a modal on the customer file.
How to run it
Preparation
Invite the designer, the PM and one person who handles support tickets. Support knows where users get lost.
Export the current navigation as a list and the top 30 pages by traffic, with their bounce rate. Send both the day before.
Pre-fill the board with the current tree on the left, greyed out, and an empty space on the right for the target tree.
Agenda
15 min
Read the current tree Walk the existing structure top to bottom. Mark in red every node support mentions in tickets and every page with a bounce above 70 %.
20 min
List the jobs Each person writes the five things users come to do, one per sticky, in the user's words. Merge to a list of 6 to 10 jobs.
35 min
Card sort Write every page as a card. In pairs, group the cards by job without looking at the current tree. Compare the two groupings and keep what both pairs did the same.
30 min
Draw the target tree Build the new hierarchy from the groups: top level = jobs, second level = pages. No node deeper than three levels. Name each node with a verb or a plain noun, no marketing labels.
15 min
Test with a task Give the support person three real tickets and ask them to point where the answer lives in the new tree. Every hesitation is a node to rename or move.
5 min
Close Mark the pages to merge, the pages to delete and the redirects needed. That list is the deliverable, not the drawing.
Pitfalls
Do not mirror the org chart. Users do not know which team owns a page and should never need to.
Do not keep a section because it exists. Every node in the target tree must map to a job from the list or go.
Do not go deeper than three levels. If you need a fourth, the second level is wrong.
Afterwards
The target tree and the redirect list go to the tech lead for the migration plan. The designer uses the tree as the skeleton for low-fidelity wireframes of the top-level pages.