Designing for the early product discovery phase as a founding designer.
As the founding product designer at Clarity, an early-stage startup, I played a key role in our product discovery phase—ensuring we tackled the right problem, validated market demand, and leveraged the team’s expertise. As the first design hire, my role was to bring early visions and hypotheses to life for testing early while collaborating closely with the founders on product thinking and strategy.
The lost customer feedback context across team communications leads to poor product decisions and customer churn.
Critical product context is often lost across teams despite regular meetings. Product teams own decisions but lack full visibility into customer insights from sales. With different teams handling separate touchpoints, reliance on verbal communication leads to gaps—resulting in half-baked decisions and a disconnect from real customer needs.
How might we make it easy for product teams to make better product decisions and stay close to customers?
Initial discovery research was done through user interviews to understand sales<>product collaboration process in depth to understand bottlenecks and opportunities in the space.
Below are the main bottlenecks at different steps of the sales<>product collaboration.
Sales
Sales team manually take notes on feedback from all customer calls, saving them to sale team's CRM.
Sales <> Product
Product
The product team manually keeps a note of feedback coming from sales on product tools to prioritize in product roadmap.
A dedicated product<>sales collaboration tool,
focused on streamlining the workflow.
Our first iteration aimed to streamline sales–product collaboration with a shared platform, reducing context loss from ad-hoc communication and enabling efficient feedback processing.
I prototyped a version of Figma interactive prototype to explain the concept better to our potential customers.
A project board allows the product team to further prioritize projects based on repetitive feedback or customer deal size affected.
The sales team can see customer profiles to see updates on their given feedback, overall status and their health score to reduce churn.
After presenting the concept along with prototype to potential customers, we found some main themes that helped us refine our product concept for next iteration.
Conversational workspace for early-stage companies/founders.
Our second iteration targeted founders as our ICP, offering a platform to manage early customer feedback with AI-powered extraction and grouping.
I prototyped a version of Figma interactive prototype to explain the concept better to our potential customers.
Share meetings in channels to make sure your team members are up to date with necessary information based on their relevance.
Keep track of every key contact. Clarity provides AI properties to get key information across contacts based on your needs.
Get key insight trends across meetings curated by Clarity with all the key data to for you to easily judge and prioritize.
We launched some marketing concepts on product hunt to gauge traction, and got #2 product of the day.
After presenting the concept along with the prototype to potential customers, we found some main themes that helped us refine our product concept.
Unified API for meeting recording data
An alternate iteration, inspired by learnings from our first concept, explored unlocking conversational data via a universal API—like Merge, but for meetings.
I put together a quick marketing website on Webflow to gauge market traction.
After internal discussions, we identified key drawbacks in this approach, leading us to discontinue further exploration.
Conversational data work OS.
Our next iteration, building on concept 2, focused on leveraging AI to deliver smarter, low-effort tools for founders, minimizing the need for manual input.
I put together a quick marketing website on Webflow to gauge market traction.
After presenting the concept to potential customers, we found some main themes that helped us refine our product concept.
The best meeting recorder.
Our final iteration evolved into a meeting recorder, aligning with our vision of enabling shared context for decision-making by unlocking the most valuable data—conversational meeting insights.
After deploying the app to pilot customers, we finally received positive feedback appreciating the improved UX.
Getting feedback early.
In high-speed startup environments, open and honest feedback—no matter how uncomfortable—is key to staying efficient and aligned.
Learning on the go.
Early product discovery phase is really about getting customer feedback or gauging PMF as soon as possible. I learnt a lot of tools like Jitter, Webflow and Midjourney on the go to create marketing materials fast.
Keeping the team aligned.
Small teams come with a lot of responsibilities on the individual contributors to communicate and keep everyone aligned. I, being the only designer worked towards communicating design work, feedback and directions to keep the momentum going.
Staying close to customers.
Rather than spending time on creating deep research studies, Slack channels for quick Loom videos, or questions is really a faster way to get feedback fast and ship fast.
