How Refractional unites its hardware and software teams on Slate

The challenge

Refractional builds a physical product, and physical products are unforgiving. Hardware, firmware, software, and clinical validation all have to move together, and a slip in any one of them ripples through the rest.

For a long time, each of those worlds ran on its own. Hardware tracked progress one way, software another, and the clinical team worked in a system built for neither. The handoffs between them were where deadlines quietly went to die.

A change in the device would reach the software team late. A clinical requirement would surface after a design was already locked. Each group was doing careful work, but the seams between them were rough, and on a hardware timeline rough seams are expensive.

A hardware delay and a software delay are not the same problem, but they were landing in completely different tools, so no one saw the full picture.

Mark Sullivan - Head of Engineering, Refractional

When a single missed dependency can push a manufacturing date by weeks, the company couldn't afford for its teams to be looking at different versions of reality.

Why Slate

Refractional moved to Slate to bring hardware, software, and clinical work into one place, where the dependencies between them would finally be visible.

Most tools are built for software teams. Slate was the first that could hold our hardware, software, and clinical work in one place.

That breadth was the draw. Slate didn't force the hardware team to think like a software team, or the clinical team to bend to a workflow built for engineers. Each group kept how it worked, but now their work lived on one surface, where a dependency in one showed up clearly in the others.

For the first time, the whole program could be seen at once, instead of stitched together from three systems that never quite agreed.

How they use it

Today every part of a Refractional product, physical and digital, runs through a single workspace.

Hardware milestones live in Slate next to the software and firmware work that depends on them. When a date moves, everyone downstream sees it immediately, rather than discovering it at the next cross-team meeting.

The clinical and regulatory team tracks validation work in the same place, with each requirement tied to the engineering tasks it touches. Compliance stops being a separate track that surprises everyone late and becomes part of the same visible plan.

When a hardware date moves, the software and clinical teams see it the same day, not at the next meeting.

Atlas helps hold the program together, surfacing shifted timelines and flagging dependencies at risk before they turn into missed dates.

What changed

The clearest change was that the whole program finally fit in one view.

For the first time, we can see the entire program in one place instead of three.

Dependencies stopped hiding in the gaps between tools. A change in hardware reached software and clinical while there was still time to respond, and the late surprises that used to derail timelines grew rare.

The seams between teams smoothed out, because the teams were no longer separated by the tools they used. And the program as a whole became something the company could actually see and steer, rather than reconstruct after the fact.

The result

Refractional now runs its entire development program on Slate, hardware and software alike.

Products move toward manufacturing more predictably, because dependencies are visible and surprises are caught early. The clinical team works in step with engineering instead of arriving late. And the company spends its energy building a hard, precise product rather than reconciling three views of where that product stands.

Slate is the first tool that could hold every side of a hardware company at once.

For a company built on precision optics, getting a clear, single picture of its own work turned out to be just as valuable as the clarity its devices bring to everyone else.