Company
Alioth
Team
Product Manager x 1
Engineer x 1
My Role
Head of Design
Responsibilities
Interaction Design, Visual Design, User Research, Stakeholder Alignment, Prototyping, Branding
Tools
Figma, Sketchbooks, and Whimsical
Platforms
Web
Year
2023
Project Goal
Improve executive search outcomes by attracting higher quality candidates with improved job postings.
Challenges
As an early stage startup, we had extremely limited resources, and a lot to do. Then add in a global pandemic.
Results
Grew from zero to seventy clients.
Received an net promoter score of 100.
My Impact
I did everything from development of the brand identity to establishment of our user research practice.
Highlights:
Created all design processes from multi-disciplinary workshops to hand-off.
Conducted user interviews with 6 internal and 3 external professionals to identify their process and pain points.
Strategized the product roadmap.
Built and maintained a design system.
Research & Exploration
I conducted over twelve hours of interviews with potential customers and internal experts and used those findings to create three distinct personas as well as an accompanying journey map for our primary persona.
We discovered that recruiters took great pride in their relationship management skills, and identified common challenges like creating compelling job descriptions that helped them stand out in a crowded market. This research was critical to informing the feature set of our product. We could create a compelling design, and leverage AI to aid in copywriting. This would free up the time to create and maintain client relationships.
From there, my product manager and I created wireframes in Whimsical to explore a wide variety of higher-level flows and individual page treatments.
Design & Validation
This product had begin its life as an internal tool. Accordingly, designs had been validated via close collaboration while wire-framing.
I built a design system in Figma to maximize my efficiency and maintain velocity for engineering.
I created a prototype to identify any rough edges in the flows, and to assist in the hand-off conversations with engineering.
As we approached the launch to external customers, we would test on the live site.
Learnings
Feedback from our internal recruiters, and initial batch of customers was overwhelmingly positive.
We would have to build out an illustration and image library as our customer base grew and represented a broader range of industries.
Our LLM would require repetitions to train it to really deliver on our vision.
From a personal standpoint, my time at Alioth taught me how critically important collaboration and flexibility are at early-stage startups.
Future Vision
We explored the notion of spinning this feature out into a stand alone product to generate revenue as our small team built out a more robust Alioth platform.
