A product with no design foundation
Screenloop is an early-stage startup searching for product-market fit, building interview intelligence tooling with ambitions to become a full Talent Operations Platform. Small engineering team, one designer, no design integration in the process.
No design system. No research practice. No product strategy or vision. Product decisions happened in engineering sprints without design input.
Lead design strategy, execution and nurture the team around it.
- Assess the brand, product and tech stack. Understand the gap before designing anything.
- Improve design presence and integration in team meetings and product decisions
- Plan and execute an incremental redesign focused on quality and usability
- Implement a UX research practice and product discovery process
- Build and document the Screenloop design system
- Increase collaboration between product, engineering, customer success and sales
The design strategy
I spent the first three months in conversations with customers, the product team, engineers and the data. Talent acquisition teams were not struggling with software. They were struggling with coordination. The software failure was a symptom.
That framing changed everything. We were not redesigning a recruiter tool. We were designing a coordination layer for hiring pipelines.
One platform, one architecture
Interview Intelligence, scorecards, pipeline management, reporting, smart scheduling and the ATS. The design problem was architectural: create a coherent product language across six separate surfaces, built by three engineering teams, serving two distinct user types. Users were context-switching constantly, rebuilding mental models every time they moved between features.
Six products, one coherent system
The design system came first. A constraint on everything else, not a side project. Every new feature was an opportunity to extend the system. Within 18 months we had a live, documented system engineering referenced daily.
The product work spanned Interview Intelligence, an interview quality analytics dashboard, Candidate Experience and CNPS, the next-generation ATS, AI-assisted scorecards, and the design system itself. Each surface was treated as part of the same product, not a separate project.
Three calls that shaped the outcome
Design system before delivery speed
The temptation was to ship fast and standardise later. Building the system in parallel, even when it briefly slowed sprint velocity, meant we shipped consistently at a pace no amount of retrofitting could have matched. Delivery speed went up, not down.
Research as a product input, not a UX ritual
Every research cycle was tied to a product decision on the table. No research theatre. By the second year, PMs were requesting research slots, not tolerating them.
Two user types, one mental model
The product served recruiters and hiring managers, whose needs diverge significantly. Unifying the information architecture around the hiring pipeline, not the user role, reduced onboarding time and eliminated the most common navigation confusion.
Results that moved the business
Created, measured and managed 400+ design and research tasks, 39% ATS-related. Usage and adoption data from July 2023 to June 2024, following the launch of the next-gen Talent Operations Platform.
What this changed
Four years building from nothing taught me something that senior roles at established companies cannot: the hardest design work is not the interface. It is creating the conditions, cultural, organisational and operational, for good design to happen repeatedly without me in every room.
The design function started as a placeholder on an org chart. Four years later, it was the thing the product was built on.