There is a particular species of software problem that lives between a muddy boot and a payroll ledger. A worker clocks in at one place, performs work under rules written somewhere else, belongs to a crew with its own rates and credentials, and expects to be paid correctly on Friday. The office wants clean data. The field wants to get on with the day. In the gap sits Gregory Fast, a designer whose career has been a long education in how buildings, people, and information refuse to behave like tidy diagrams.
Fast is a founding member and Head of Design at Lumber, the construction workforce software company. The title sounds polished. The material is anything but. Lumber covers payroll, time tracking, compliance, HR, safety, field operations, rewards, and recognition. Each word conceals a thicket. Payroll alone can involve union agreements, prevailing wage schedules, job costing, taxes, certified reports, and corrections from a timecard that has endured coffee, weather, and handwriting.
This is design far from the fashionable end of the business. Nobody queues overnight for a better certified payroll report. Yet when that report is late or wrong, its importance becomes wonderfully clear. Fast's work lives in that inversion: the quieter the screen, the louder the consequence.
The apprenticeship of the practical
His route to software ran through the built environment. Fast studied at Miami University and earned an Autodesk professional certification in Revit, the modeling software used across architecture, engineering, and construction. By 2016 he was at Microdesk, a consultancy focused on BIM, virtual design and construction, and the digital systems around buildings. Four years later, an author biography credited him with 14 years of industry experience.
The useful thing about BIM work is that it punishes vague enthusiasm. A model has geometry, dependencies, standards, owners, and a future life beyond the person drawing it. A wall moved here can disturb a system there. Information must travel between disciplines without becoming folklore. Design, in this world, is as much about coordination as appearance.
Former colleagues remembered Fast as someone who could move among technology, architecture, construction, business development, and presentation. They also credited him with teaching successful classes and starting a company-wide mentorship program. The details suggest a temperament suited to product work: understand the system, explain it clearly, then make it easier for the next person to use.
- Microdesk
Work inside the AEC and BIM consulting world. - Construction Executive
A published argument for practical, repeatable jobsite automation. - VisualizeROI
Head of Product & Design for a B2B value-communication platform. - Lumber
Founding member and Head of Design for construction workforce software.
Fast later led product and design at VisualizeROI, a platform built to help B2B companies communicate economic value. It was another form of translation: take a complex set of assumptions and give a customer something legible enough to trust. The subject changed at Lumber, but the essential task remained. Make intricate systems understandable without pretending they are simple.
“Witnessing a Spot robot in person can be a mixture of cute and terrifying.”Gregory Fast, writing about jobsite automation in 2020
A robot dog, with caveats
In 2020, Fast wrote about Boston Dynamics' Spot and the rise of robotic construction surveying. It was an irresistible subject: a four-legged machine walking a site, capturing images, and feeding the industry's appetite for better records. Fast granted the spectacle its due. He called seeing Spot “a mixture of cute and terrifying,” a line with the correct proportion of wonder and suspicion.
His argument was grounded. Site documentation is repetitive, slow, and inconsistent. Inspectors can take hundreds or thousands of photographs, leaving another person to organize and interpret them. A robot can walk a prescribed route again and again, at consistent intervals, and collect comparable information. Humans remain better at the untidy conditions of an evolving site. The productive arrangement gives repetition to the machine and judgment to the person.
That distinction has aged well. It is also a compact philosophy of product design in the age of AI. The point is not to sprinkle intelligence across a workflow and admire the glitter. The point is to decide where automation can carry a burden without erasing the context that makes the work correct.
Fast's recurring design problem
Lumber now applies that bargain to paperwork with a pulse. Its AI agents are aimed at union agreements, prevailing wages, and paper timecards. The terms are less charming than Spot, but the design questions are nearly identical. What can the machine read reliably? When should a person intervene? How do you show uncertainty? How much explanation belongs in the moment of decision? A bad answer can turn automation into another employee who needs supervision.
The system behind the screen
The company describes itself as built by people from construction. Fast's background gives that claim a specific meaning. He did not arrive at the jobsite by way of a trend report. He had already worked with the models, workflows, and adoption problems of AEC technology. He had written about why technical promise stalls against practical conditions. He knew that a tool is only as modern as the last person forced to duplicate its data.
In March 2025, Lumber announced a $15.5 million Series A led by Foundation Capital, following a year in which the company launched eight products. Money and product count are company facts, not personal medals. For a head of design, they describe pressure. More products create more paths through a system, more edge cases, and more opportunities for one screen to contradict another. Growth expands the designer's obligation to coherence.
The platform's scope makes this unusually visible. Time tracking feeds payroll. Payroll feeds compliance. Credentials touch staffing and safety. Field data meets finance. Each boundary is a place where a user can be made to repeat something, wonder which version is true, or call support. The design leader's real medium is not the screen. It is the handoff.
A fondness for the operating manual
Fast's credentials include courses in operational excellence and Six Sigma foundations, both completed in 2020. On a résumé, those can look like the sober cousins at a creative family dinner. In a construction product, they belong at the head of the table. A payroll run is a process. A safety acknowledgment is a process. Moving a worker from applicant to employee to the correct crew is several processes wearing one hard hat.
Process training also supplies a useful check on a designer's instincts. A redesigned screen may feel cleaner while quietly moving work downstream. One team saves a click; another gains a reconciliation. The operational view asks where the time actually went, who now owns the exception, and whether the result can be repeated next week. Those questions have little glamour and excellent manners. They insist that the whole system be invited into the room.
Lumber's product range turns that habit into daily necessity. A contractor may begin with a field clock-in, but the information eventually touches supervisors, payroll administrators, finance teams, and outside reporting requirements. Each person sees a different portion and carries a different risk. Designing the shared record means deciding what each role must know, what can remain hidden, and when the software should interrupt. Too little guidance produces errors. Too much turns a simple task into a seminar.
This is where Fast's combination of teaching and operations becomes more than biography. Good instruction reveals sequence: what matters first, what can wait, and how to recover when the expected path breaks. A good interface does the same work silently. It is a lesson with buttons.
That helps explain why mentorship belongs in Fast's story. A design system is partly a collection of components, but it is also a way of teaching a growing group how to make consistent decisions. The person who once organized a mentorship program was already practicing a version of design leadership: distribute judgment instead of hoarding it.
The dignity of fewer surprises
There is a comic mismatch in asking an industry that pours concrete to admire frictionless software. Construction is made of friction. Materials arrive late. Conditions change. Contracts preserve disagreements in exquisite detail. The software succeeds when it acknowledges those facts and still gives the next person a clear action.
Fast's public career offers no grand doctrine and, mercifully, no claim that an app will reinvent the physical world by Tuesday. It offers a series of practical commitments. Learn the domain. Respect repetition. Teach the system. Put automation where consistency matters. Leave room for human interpretation where reality declines to cooperate.
At the AGC of California event in Long Beach in August 2024, Fast stood with colleague Adam Domingue behind a bright green table crowded with the ordinary furniture of a software booth: laptops, tablets, cups, lanyards. Behind them hung the Lumber name. It is an apt picture of construction technology. The building is elsewhere. The work on the table is to make all the invisible obligations around it behave.
For Fast, that work joins the two halves of his career. The BIM consultant learned that information has to survive many hands. The product designer learned that complexity must be staged rather than denied. The design leader now has to make a widening platform feel like one place. The aim is not software that announces itself. It is a Friday on which the hours reconcile, the rules are visible, the records travel, and nobody has to stay late to discover why.