Leading the kickoff meeting: defining the scope with PM, Engineering Leads, and Business Stakeholders, and capturing business goals and the engineering limitations, system constraints, or infrastructure realities that dictate what can actually be built.

By choosing direct and indirect competitors, I evaluate the market landscape to locate opportunities and understand how current products address the problem.

I gather user insights from whatever is available: support tickets, sales calls, existing research, or direct chats with internal users. From there, I build personas, map the journey, and find where users drop off or hit friction.

I work with back-end engineers to gather the available and required data, then build a basic layout that reflects real content. I skip lo-fi unless a product has no design direction yet.

I run sessions with 3-5 users or internal teammates to check four things: does the flow have logic, is the copy clear for non-builders, are there gaps or broken interactions, does the value proposition land in 30 seconds.

For a new product with no design system, I explore multiple visual directions and pick one to build a starter component library. For an existing product, I align with the front-end team on the library they already use, then design within those components so handoff is faster.

I walk engineers through the Figma file in a live session, annotate spacing and states in dev mode, and write spec notes for anything Figma cannot show, and stay available through the build.

After launch, I track user feedback, support tickets, and analytics. I maintain a design debt log of small problems we shipped with, along with planned fixes for the next sprint.