Avy
Founding designer on an AI assistant that pulled a company's scattered tools into one place.
R&D teams' context was spread across five tools that didn't talk to each other. Things got lost in the gaps, and "just check Slack" was everyone's answer to everything.
I was the only designer at a pre-seed company, so I couldn't afford to build the wrong thing. I did 30+ user interviews before picking a direction, trying to understand the actual shape of the problem instead of validating something I already liked. That's what surfaced the real insight: people think in terms of their workday's rhythm, not tool categories. That became the core idea. A daily timeline that surfaces the right thing at the right moment, instead of one more dashboard to check.
At this size, that mostly meant sitting next to engineering every day to make sure AI-generated summaries were actually trustworthy, and working directly with the CEO on product and go-to-market. Design and business decisions were the same conversation, not two separate ones.
Built the company's design system and product direction from nothing, backed by real research instead of guesswork, and shipped an assistant that replaced manual searching with one daily-rhythm view.