I’m a
Lead Designer
the messy middle, the space where a vague idea needs to become a tangible, scalable reality.
help scale a design culture, go from 0 to 1,
turn lemons into lemonade,
Design Process
CV
I’m a
Design Process
CV
3 Year Product Vision
Team
Head of Product
Head of Design
Principal Designer
Lead Designer 🙋🏻♀️
With a new Head of Product and Head of Design joining Nextdoor, we wanted to create a shift in product culture where the entire company is brought in to envision the future of Nextdoor. NextNextdoor was focused on delivering a compelling 3 year vision for the product that would increase retention of current members, expand our audience and drive local interactions. Partnering with Design Leadership, I facilitated 9 weeks of design thinking workshops focused on high-level visioning processes across the entire product org.
Process
We believed that the people in the best position to envision the future are product teams themselves, who know the problems and user needs intimately, working on their respective product areas day in and day out.
The project was a multi-week, high-level visioning process designed to inform 2020 planning. Each week had a different theme and was organized based on the product org, with each week focusing on a new vertical. As part of the core team of 3, I would run design thinking workshops with a different product team, starting from user insights sharing, product team sharing, followed by brainstorming possible solutions, quick paper sketching, paper prototyping and an end-of-week takeaways. At the end of each week, Jef and I updated a NextNextdoor App prototype that tied together the vision in progress. This process culminated in sharing of the prototype with the whole company.
Impact
Strategic Focus
Through the diverging and converging exercises of the design workshops, we aligned on Nextdoor’s strategic differentiation. By leaning into "trust and hyperlocality," Nextdoor positioned itself away from the broader "community" space occupied by competitors like Facebook.
Company Wide Roadmap Alignment
The 3 year vision directly informed 2020 product planning and established clear goals, including revenue and NPS targets. Sharing the prototype across the company beyond the Product Org enabled the whole company to visualize the future we were building and to buy into the vision.
Product Org Cultural Shift
The project successfully fostered a more "customer-centered culture" and enabled cross-functional collaboration between Product, Design, Eng, Growth, Data Science teams.