An NFT creation and management platform

I was responsible for the Creator Suite product and the company’s internal management tool product as both designer and product owner (startup life!)

Originally when I joined the company, the Creator Suite existed in a pre-MVP state, having been built using unstyled Tailwind CSS components, and was sort of half-finished. The users for it - the electronic musicians - existed in the business ecosystem, but had never been onboarded to the product.

Setting the vision, managing the roadmap

I planned and ran a vision and roadmap workshop to understand the vision from everyone around the organisation, bring everyone along, and set a vision for the next months of work.

So we had musician partners already and a half-baked platform for them - how would we bring the two together?

To start on onboard them, I designed a feature that was pretty easy to build and small enough to gently get everyone onto the system - card approvals. Before this feature, the entire process of creating a card was done in emails between the artist and our employees, including all document uploads, approvals and iterations. As we scaled, this process and its lack of transparency was becoming a stressor.

In the screens below, there’s one thing the user needs to do - approve the card. Can you find where to do that on the first screen? 🤔

My very ugly baby

Every new feature also required the employee-side product to reflect the changes. The employee tool has previously never been touched by a designer, and had a pretty bad user experience in many ways. And I had control over the engineering backlog! It was an exercise in prioritisation and self control as a product designer to remind myself that this product only had less than 30 users, all employees - so the ROI of a redesign just didn’t add up.

An example of one page below, the Card Definitions page:

In what we actually shipped, we just added functionality to make user’s lives easier as fast as possible.

• Made the navigation less horrible, and removed the “Back to App” link which threw people off a lot

• Added a total results count of all table rows, so card managers didn’t have to count manually, which they were (!)

• Added ability to select and do actions on multiple rows at once

• Added filters to the table

The end result isn’t pretty, but I’m proud of the impact I had as a product designer - it was easier and faster for my users to use, and made it easier for them to do their jobs - and in a situation where visual design wasn’t a priority, I’m happy I didn’t use any engineering time on it.

Internal research

I was a design, research and product management team of one on this product. I used Figjam to record all my research in one big brain dump board. I found this an effective way to visualise everything, and I liked that Figjam made it open to everyone on the team to access. I also experimented with Roam Research as a note taking tool.