Approach
Approach & strategy.
Understanding the user's real story.
When I start a new product, I need to understand the user, the problems they’re trying to solve, and the reality of their daily life. People come to products with distractions, expectations, and existing habits, so it’s important to understand the real story behind the data before anything else. The goal is to design around their real behavior and not the idealized version they describe.
Once that story is clear, then it's time to dive into the qualitative and quantitative data. What are this person's goals? What problems and pain points do they face? What competitor products do they use? What do they enjoy about existing solutions?
Constraints become creativity.
Constraints are a major part of how I work. Budget, team size, engineering capacity, and timelines all shape what’s possible, and those constraints become a source of creativity rather than a limitation.
No product exists independently: design, development, business, and marketing need to stay aligned. Early on, we don’t need perfect fidelity; we need clarity around the problem.
From divergence to convergence.
I approach early stages with divergence (exploring many ideas) and then, once the direction becomes clearer, I move into systems, reusable components, and patterns. These systems determine how fast we can iterate, and iteration is the key to success.
The strategy is to expand the surface area of testing and fail quickly, especially when working under runway and budget constraints. This is why I build small target user cohorts (usually 5-8 people) who help test as we go.
How do I pick features?
Feature prioritization is a balance between:
what’s most helpful for the user
what engineering can build quickly
what we can test easily
what is marketable and shareable
Being lean means staying closely aligned with engineering. Figma Make helps me visualize ideas and them in front of eng so we can cycle through ideas quickly. Engineers bring valuable, creative, and oftentimes unexpected feedback to the table.
Satisfying users, investors, & the market.
A good product adapts to satisfy users, business realities, investor expectations, and market needs. Products don't exist in a vacuum, so they must answer to these forces all at the same time.
The secret ingredient? Good branding. People write it off as fluff, but branding can be a huge differentiator in an increasingly competitive market.
AI is the new design leverage.
I create leverage by using AI as a partner for audits, strategy, copy, marketing, prototyping, and distribution. AI and rapid prototyping let me validate ideas quickly and replicate myself across different projects and products.