I've been the founding or early product design hire at five companies over nine years, CareMonitor, EngineRoom, Reejig, n0de, and now TeamHiiv, usually before there was a scoped product to design for.
Four genuinely different kinds of complexity so far, healthcare data, business analytics, workforce intelligence, and sustainability data, with agentic AI now the fifth.
Case Studies
n0de: Getting a Small Business Owner from "I Don't Know Where to Start" to a Funded Solar Install
The founders knew where they wanted to land, ambitious Net Zero 2030-or-better commitments, but hadn't locked in how to get there. They'd originally assumed the company would live on the hardware and data side, before realising the real roadblock sits somewhere else entirely: a business owner knowing they should do something about emissions, and having no clear, specific starting point. I joined as the first product design hire, before there was a product to design.
Reejig: Fixing Search So People Could Actually Trust What It Found
Search sat at the centre of how customers used Reejig, and it wasn't working. There was no documentation for how the existing solution behaved, no research or strategy behind it, and support tickets kept landing on the same handful of problems. One line from a user summed up the state of it: "Also the fact that I have to type in San Francisco into Reejig drives me nuts. I didn't even know there was another one and that's like the worst word to type." That's the kind of small, specific frustration that tells you the whole thing needs rebuilding, not patching.
EngineRoom: Turning "The Thing Not to Be Understood" Into a Plan Advisors Actually Used
Turning EngineRoom's most-avoided feature, built from one person's head with no documentation, into a plan Advisors and customers actually trusted and used.