Head of Product & Design
Align
Align is an AI and ML enabled conversation intelligence SaaS company helping B2B product, CX and solutions teams prioritize the right work, and understand their customers at scale.
I joined the team at Align only a few months into their journey as part of the founding team, leading product & design. The team had already explored the preliminary market fit and raised funding so I hit the ground running with working on the direction and fine-tuning for the market.
Align is an AI and ML enabled conversation intelligence SaaS company helping B2B product, CX and solutions teams prioritize the right work, and understand their customers at scale.
The goal of Align
The goal of Align
The goal of Align
Process
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Since Align sits within a highly competitive and rapid moving market, we were constantly running agile experiments with design partners and the wider market. AI enabled tools to improve operations within a company, for any persona, shows no sign of slowing down, so we explored how we could keep developing the same technology but apply it to a number of roles, to figure out where we could cover the most needs and provide enough value to get paid for it.
FINISH
By it's nature, tooling built on AI is time intensive, it requires fine tuned training and a large amount of technical hours. We made up for how time intensive this work is by being extremely agile in the vision, prioritization and design phases. We had early buy in with a number of design partners, as well as wide interest from the market. We leveraged these relationships to run through prototype testing or collaborative feedback sessions early and often, allow us to pivot quickly, without a loss of dev time.
REDOOOOO
With all companies, but especially startups, it’s important to be able to move quickly and experiment often, and creating a design system that is mirrored in a component system within the code itself is paramount to that. With a design system that is deeply maintainable and comprehensive; there is very little UI guesswork for designers or developers. This reduces the time to completion for a feature dramatically. It also means it was possible to go through a more mature rebrand within a few months of launch with no major dev time lost.
This design system was a focus of mine from the start, building it up as we designed necessary features. Everything from modals, tables and our entire screen structure was built with interchangeable and deeply nested blocks. I have so much to say on this topic, but will leave it for another day.
Addressing User & Market Needs
There are a number of issues that almost every business faces that we wanted to address. I joined the company because the team had set out to solve the problems that I had faced in every one of my roles in the past, and I knew from numerous conversations that I was not alone. Those of us in product, research and design struggle with a few of the same things and ask the same questions over and over.
How can I find out what I don't know? Am I working on the right things? Did what we worked on actually work? Are there ways I could solve for this with less effort or a higher payoff? How can I communicate the way and the what to the rest of the company and also understand their why and what?
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Conclusion
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Framer 2023
Amsterdam