Shaping product strategy through design vision
At Krisp (~200 employees at the time), the core challenge was existential: built on a successful noise cancellation technology, the app was mostly invisible to users, easily lost as a feature rather than a standalone product. The company needed to find a killer app that could carry recognizable value to a wider audience and expand the total addressable market. But the product was being built feature-by-feature as new technology became available, resulting in a fragmented user journey and no clear strategic direction. I took on a project to create a product vision that would unify our efforts, address user problems, and point toward the right future.
My goal was to prototype the future with a few compelling hero images and interactions, that would energize the team and allow for better prioritization. Partnering with a product director and a founder, I led a highly iterative, four-week process. I focused on exploring divergent ideas and converging on a solution based on feedback from stakeholders, our design team, and users. This fast, iterative approach was essential to validate our ideas quickly and get buy-in from the organization.
I used a user journey map to centralize all of our insights and identify key interactions where we could elevate the experience. My explorations, which ranged from a “today view” to a more collaborative focus, ultimately landed on a “speech coaching” direction. This was a clear user problem we could aim to solve, and a way to differentiate ourselves in the market.
I designed a unified flow that addressed core user problems and showcased the product’s future. I focused on hero interactions like the onboarding and in-call experiences, defining a seamless journey that connected the app’s various features. This project also provided the tech team with a clear roadmap, turning abstract ideas into tangible designs that could be measured and built upon.
The project delivered exactly what was needed — though not in the way we initially expected. By making the product direction tangible and testable, the vision showed leadership that this particular path wouldn’t carry the company where it needed to go. That clarity was the real outcome: the design vision gave the stakeholder group the confidence to make a major strategic pivot, and many of our ideas influenced the tech team’s roadmap going forward. Design is a powerful tool for prediction. It lets us show, not just tell, a compelling story about the future and shape the product’s, and ultimately the company’s direction.