From Nothing to Shipped With Half the Team You'd Expect

Full app redesign owned end-to-end by two designers. Higher retention, more signups, fewer support calls.

The brief: full app redesign. The team: two designers, including me. No one above us on the design side to make the difficult calls or catch what we missed.

Before moving into “the good stuff” (aka Figma), we sorted out how we were going to run it. We started by defining a sprint structure, what we'd deliver and when, how we'd communicate with the client and with engineering, and what handoff would look like. On a project this size with two people carrying it, process wasn’t something to be left to wander, it's what keeps the whole thing from becoming a mess. We built a component library alongside the product. It can’t really be called a design system, the scope didn't call for that, but a proper shared repository that both of us worked from consistently, and could also share with engineering. No more re-explaining components at every handoff, no drift between our work, no engineering surprises.

Halfway through, the client wanted to add features. Usually, this leads to some issues, right? Well, because we'd set up a sprint-based workflow from the start with exactly this kind of thing in mind, we were able to absorb them and adjust delivery without the project falling apart. The planning we'd done upfront is what made that possible. Without it, new features mid-project would have been a problem. Instead, they were just the next sprint.

The app shipped and got adopted. Signups went up, retention improved, and support call volume dropped. That last one is the measure I care about most, it means people could actually use the thing without needing help.