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| Role | Sole / founding Product Designer |
|---|---|
| Company | ThisThat |
| Focus | 0-to-1 product design, MVP strategy, onboarding, dashboards, notifications and design systems |
| Contribution | Discovery, product strategy, user research, rapid prototyping, experimentation, UX/UI design, visual identity and developer handoff |
| Team | Founders, engineering and marketing |
| Timeline | October 2024 - July 2025 |
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ThisThat was a founder-led startup turning an early proposition into a product people could understand, use and return to. I joined as the sole and founding product designer, with responsibility extending beyond the interface: I helped shape what we should build, how we would test it, how the team would make product decisions and how design would operate as the company moved from concept towards traction.
There was no established product-design function to inherit. I created the working practices, research approach, product journeys, visual language and delivery system while continuing to ship alongside engineering. I moved between founder workshops, customer discovery, rapid prototypes, detailed interaction design, brand decisions, sprint planning and implementation reviews, often within the same week.
The central challenge was to create enough structure to support confident decisions without introducing the weight of a mature product organisation. Every design activity had to improve the immediate experience and reduce uncertainty about what the product should become next.
Within six months, ThisThat progressed from concept to early product-market fit. Iterations across onboarding, dashboards, notifications and core journeys contributed to 20% week-over-week user growth. I reduced time-to-prototype by 50% and established a component-led delivery workflow that reduced the design-to-development cycle by 30%.
I joined while the company was still resolving fundamental questions about the product. The founders had conviction about the opportunity, but that knowledge needed to be translated into an experience that made sense to somebody encountering it for the first time.
The mandate combined four jobs that would normally be split across several roles:
| Responsibility | What the company needed | How I responded |
|---|---|---|
| Product definition | A focused MVP rather than a growing collection of founder ideas | Turned assumptions into hypotheses, mapped the core journey and helped prioritise the smallest coherent release |
| Customer understanding | Evidence about what users understood, valued and struggled with | Combined discovery, prototype testing, product signals and A/B testing to guide iteration |
| Experience quality | A product that felt clear and credible despite being early | Designed onboarding, dashboards, notifications and core workflows as one connected experience |
| Design operations | A repeatable way for design and engineering to ship together | Established two-week design cycles, reusable components and a more precise handoff process |
The difficulty was not a lack of ideas. It was deciding which ideas would produce meaningful learning, sequencing them into a usable product and maintaining coherence while the proposition was changing.
As the only designer, I had direct responsibility for both the quality of the product and the quality of the decisions behind it. There was no design manager or wider design team to define the process, validate the work or absorb adjacent brand and communication needs.
I worked directly with the founders on product direction and prioritisation, with engineers on feasibility and implementation, and with marketing on how the product was represented outside the interface. This gave me a view across the entire customer experience and allowed me to identify gaps that would have been missed if design had been limited to feature delivery.
My contribution included: