👥People Tab - Expanding and collapsing the node

📍 Today: In the People tab, users can view the org structure but cannot expand or collapse individual nodes on demand. That makes larger org charts harder to navigate, especially when an admin, manager, or HR stakeholder only needs to focus on one branch of the organization at a time.

In practice, the experience becomes noisy as the org grows. Users end up scrolling through unrelated teams, losing context, and spending extra time trying to visually isolate the reporting line they actually care about. The UI pattern used by Justsift is a strong example of the kind of interaction that would make this view much more usable.

✨ Desired: Add the ability to expand and collapse nodes directly within the People tab org chart.

Users should be able to:

• Collapse branches they do not need to see

• Expand only the team, manager, or reporting chain they are reviewing

• Move through large org structures without losing visual clarity

Ideally, this would follow the same familiar disclosure pattern users see in mature enterprise tools and org-chart experiences, where a node with direct reports can be expanded or collapsed inline without reloading the page.

📊 Business Justification: This matters much more at enterprise scale than it does in a small org.

• Improves usability for large orgs: HR, IT, and business stakeholders often work across hundreds or thousands of employees. A fully open chart becomes difficult to scan quickly.

• Reduces admin overhead: Admins spend less time explaining how to navigate the org chart or working around limitations during audits, planning sessions, and stakeholder reviews.

• Supports manager and HR workflows: Managers and HR teams often need to review one branch at a time for workforce planning, reorganizations, succession planning, and access discussions.

• Creates a more modern enterprise experience: Expand/collapse behavior is standard in platforms that deal with hierarchical data. Without it, the chart feels harder to use than comparable solutions.

• Improves adoption and trust: Small UX improvements like this have an outsized effect on whether users see the People tab as a practical system of record or just a static visualization.

✅ Acceptance Criteria

• Nodes with direct reports display a clear expand/collapse control

• Collapsing a node hides all descendant nodes in that branch

• Expanding a node restores the hidden branch without a full page refresh

• Users can expand one branch without automatically expanding unrelated branches

• The interaction performs well in large org charts

• The state change is visually clear and intuitive for end users