How it started

Likeminded launched as a B2C platform: individuals booked group and one-to-one mental-health sessions on likeminded.care. Retention was the first problem I owned. A lot of people came to one or two group sessions and never came back.

The deeper issue was structural. Nobody could say where Product's ownership of discovery ended and Design's began. Kick-offs had no consistent shape. Without a design system, the website and the web app drifted visually apart. User stories, designs, prototypes and UX copy lived in different heads and different files.

Then the business changed underneath all of it. Selling to employers instead of individuals meant a different buyer, a different product story, and a market full of polished, well-funded competitors, while our brand still read "early-stage startup."

I treated it as two jobs running in parallel: ship what the business needed now, and build the operating system underneath so a team could scale.

The principles we designed against

Before writing a single process doc, I wrote down what good looked like. I derived four design principles straight from the company values, so a disagreement about a design could be settled by something other than seniority or taste, and so Product, Engineering and Marketing had the same vocabulary for judging the work.

Underneath the principles sat two working rules that made them operational. Our design style is flat and reduced, with bold typography and icons and a focused use of colour. Our UX patterns are clear and intuitive, combining native and custom interactions to support the intentions of the user.

In a mental-health product, "reliable and emotionally appropriate" isn't a slogan. It's a testable standard, and it's the reason our UX copy went past the psychology team before it shipped.

Setting up the product foundation and designing core journeys

I expanded the agency-built MVP without breaking business continuity, adapting its UX and UI to our own vision and to stakeholder feedback. To fix retention we designed a two-part journey: a "Basic" track and a paid "Deep Dive" with an opt-out. It lifted revenue and kept more people engaged. I designed the flows around booked and upcoming events, attendance status, automatic bundle payment, the payment funnel and bundle module overviews.

Building our design system and standardizing documentation

I audited the type scale and colour styles to cut complexity and align with Engineering, then built the design system that kept the web app and the website coherent. I defined a tone of voice for the product and reworked all UX copy to match it, reorganised our Figma file structure, and set up documentation end to end, from validation with our psychology team through to localisation in Phrase, ready for new markets. Branding guidelines lived in a Notion wiki, next to a slide-deck template and email templates in customer.io.

Design pivot of B2C to B2B

I ran research into what employers expect from a mental-health provider and shared it back across the company, then reframed the product from an individual sign-up to an employer-sponsored service. We expanded the offering: one-to-one sessions with psychological experts, group webinars and workshops, and a media library of meditations, exercises, readings and videos. I led an iterative overhaul of onboarding, introduced ML-driven recommendations based on a user's wellbeing, added a wellbeing tracker, and flattened navigation to as few layers as possible. I also worked with Sales on win/loss feedback and turned it into UX changes around ease of access, perceived quality of care and transparency about outcomes. Those were the three things prospects kept weighing us on.

Turning design into a function with a process

We ran a roles-and-responsibilities workshop with Product to settle who owned discovery, and reshaped kick-offs so we captured insights before jumping to solutions. I defined the operating cadence: exploration and sketching sessions with stakeholders, internal and cross-functional design reviews, concept and scope validation through research, feasibility checks with Engineering, and a clear standard for what a design deliverable includes. Templates for kick-offs and feasibility checks meant every initiative started the same way.

Hiring and growing the team

I brought on and mentored a working student to improve delivery reliability, then hired a visual designer as we scaled, onboarding them straight into the rebranding project. Design reviews, syncs and retros gave the team a shared bar for quality and a way to agree on priorities out loud.

Enabling non product teams to work with design

They had no intake, no backlog owner and no lead times, only Slack requests. I introduced a ticketed backlog and weekly design sprints so requests arrived with the context needed to act on them, and communicated lead times and ownership at all-hands. With our visual designer I built the marketing brand system and templates that let those teams self-serve instead of queueing, and set up a process to document every print and digital CTA in HubSpot so campaign performance could actually be tracked.

Rebranding Likeminded

Competing for HR budget required a brand that read trustworthy and human rather than scrappy. I aligned with an external agency on tone of voice, strategy and visual language, expanded their concept into a formalised look and feel, and led its rollout across every team and department. The internal design team built the new marketing and social templates; I ran shareback sessions and wrote the guidelines that made adoption company-wide rather than design-only.