Penhole

I was approached by a small team of law students who wanted someone to not only help them to design the product but also ramp up their product team and integrate a proper scrum process. Penhole started from the ground with no design implemented, which is a good thing. We had the opportunity to collect raw data initially to better understand our audience. I started building personas based on the interviews that I conducted with both the team and outside users who would download Penhole. From here, I developed journeys specific to each persona so that the team could better understand how these individuals would utilize Penhole. This would then inform the team on which specific flows were needed to account for all of the different use cases that arose during the early discovery. I had an absolute blast working with this team, and helping them ideate, discover, and deliver a validated design based on deep user understanding.

Early on I integrated Abstract for Penhole as they were in need of some way to track all of the design changes that were happening while we were iterating on the product. I was able to incorporate design GIT into their process for 360 feedback that allowed the team to constantly make updates based on our research. I integrated updates with Slack, and also onboarded the engineering team in how to utilize Abstract with the rest of the product org. Once I had this process set up, I was keen to integrate a design system, as I know how important it is to scale the product and assist the engineering team to implement the components in a timely manner to production. I dug deep and researched some of the best open-source systems out there. The team decided on Eva Design System as this was available for both Sketch, Figma, and GitHub. This alone allowed the team to develop quick iterations with ample feedback because we were able to match the design components 1:1 with the UI library and prototype the initial flows. I was able to assist and work closely with Penhole executives on raising capital for the company by providing the initial designs/prototype. In the coming months, these designs, along with the prototype that drove the feedback, were presented to initial investors and the company was able to raise enough money to continue development on the project. This was definitely one of the more fulfilling projects I have worked on. I was truly humbled in my abilities as a product leader.