I came in to some calendar improvements, but instead of only proposing UI fixes, I suggested running a broader UX audit.
It quickly became clear the issues weren't isolated — inconsistent UI, messy navigation, and no system behind the product. I highlighted how this could impact usability, scalability, and future growth.
After the audit and competitor analysis, I aligned with the founder on a bigger direction — expanding the scope from calendar fixes to a full UX audit, design system rebuild, navigation restructure, onboarding design, and team growth. A short engagement turned into a 14-month full-time role.
Instead of jumping into solutions, I focused on understanding what needed to change — and how far we could go without breaking the existing product.
The issues were consistent across all modules:
I ran a quick but structured discovery:
The product was already live, so a full redesign wasn't realistic. We needed a strategy that would: fix critical issues, support upcoming features and keep the product stable for existing users.
Impact
I owned the design roadmap. Defined a phased improvement plan, prioritized changes by user impact and development effort, and aligned engineering and the founder around a sequence that wouldn't disrupt existing users.
The product lacked a consistent design foundation, which led to fragmented UI patterns, inconsistent decision-making, and increasing design debt across both products.
I rebuilt the system as a shared foundation for product scalability and consistency:
Impact
A unified design system across web and mobile that became the foundation for everything that followed — onboarding, paid-tier launch, navigation restructure, and 2 additional designers joining without lengthy ramp time. Took the product from "no design language" to a scalable system in roughly 2 months.
When the company introduced paid subscriptions, the existing product structure broke. Free and paid features were tangled together, navigation had grown organically with no clear logic, and there was no scalable way to surface premium functionality.
I led an IA restructure across the whole product — separating free and paid features cleanly, regrouping modules around how users actually think about their day, and validating the new structure with quick user interviews before locking it in.
Impact
A clearer, more scalable product structure that supported the paid-tier launch, improved feature discoverability, and gave the team a foundation that survived future feature additions without re-restructuring.
When the paid tier launched, the product needed an onboarding flow that did more than welcome users — it had to demonstrate value fast enough to support the new subscription model.
I designed the onboarding from scratch:
Impact
A scalable onboarding system that supported paid-tier conversion and gave new users a clear path to their first "this is useful" moment — built to evolve as the product expanded.
Three months in, the scope had grown beyond what one designer could sustain. The founder asked if we should hire — I said yes, and asked to own the process end-to-end. Over the next year, I scaled the design team from 1 to 3, while shifting my own role from sole IC to design lead.
Wrote JD, interviewed candidates, made the hire — focused on someone who could operate independently in a fast-moving environment.
Built onboarding docs — task assignment, review process, dev handoff, design system usage.
Regular design reviews and 1:1s focused on growth, not just output quality.
Impact
Two senior designers hired and onboarded with full ownership over their domains. The team operated independently within 2 months — freeing me to focus on roadmap, system evolution, and stakeholder alignment instead of execution.