Designing for Growth: CompanyCam’s 2024 Product Design Strategy
How I led our design organization from emergent to structured.
🌱 Setting the Stage
At the end of 2023, CompanyCam had reached an inflection point. We had strong product-market fit in the construction tech space and an app beloved by small and midsize contractors—but our design practices hadn’t scaled alongside our success.
Our product experience was inconsistent, our research function was mostly reactive, and design work often happened in isolation. We were responding to product needs rather than shaping the future of the product itself.
To change that, I developed a 2024 Design Strategy centered on one simple word: Growth.
Growth of our practices. Growth of our people. Growth of our impact.
🚀 The Challenge
Our design and research teams were talented and motivated, but we lacked the structure to consistently influence strategy or measure our impact. Specifically:
UX maturity was emergent. We were reactive, tackling projects as they came rather than proactively driving product direction.
Research maturity was sporadic. We ran usability tests when we could, but lacked a steady rhythm of generative research and synthesis.
The customer experience was fragmented. Our design system, Slab, had gaps; design patterns weren’t consistently applied; and our in-product voice varied across surfaces.
As CompanyCam scaled, we needed to mature beyond good design execution—we needed to become a strategic design organization capable of influencing what we worked on, not just how it looked.
🧭 The Word of the Year: Growth
My 2024 Design Strategy defined growth as both an internal and external pursuit: “Growing our practices, skills, and value.”
This became a rallying cry for the team: a reminder that we were building for the long term, investing in ourselves and in the systems that enable great design.
From that north star, I built our strategy around two core pillars:
Improve how we work and what we work on.
Give our customers a unified and consistent experience.
🧩 Pillar One: Improve How We Work and What We Work On
This pillar focused on maturing our UX and research practices so design could operate as a proactive, data-informed partner in shaping the product roadmap.
From Reactive to Proactive Design
We introduced a structured UX Research Roadmap, incorporating regular usability testing, customer feedback sessions, and competitor analysis. Instead of waiting for a feature to be built before validating it, we started surfacing insights early, helping our trios (PM, Design, Tech Lead) prioritize the right problems before jumping to solutions.
Benchmarking and Continuous Improvement
We began defining UX metrics authentic to CompanyCam, tracking design quality over time and benchmarking against ourselves. These metrics helped the org see how design contributed to measurable business outcomes like adoption, retention, and satisfaction.
Evangelizing Product Design
To shift perceptions of design from “service” to “strategy,” we became storytellers. Our designers shared research insights through Notion updates, Slack channels, and all-hands presentations, taking stakeholders on a journey through customer problems, not just pixels. We started to “toot our own horn,” because that’s how others began to truly hear the value of design.
🔬 Pillar Two: Give Our Customers a Unified and Consistent Experience
The second pillar focused on reducing friction and building trust through design consistency: visually, behaviorally, and tonally.
Investing in Slab, Our Design System
Slab became the cornerstone of our internal efficiency and external polish. By documenting our components and design rules, we reduced duplicate work, aligned designers and engineers, and ensured product consistency across surfaces.
Auditing for Consistency
We conducted an experience audit to identify where old design patterns and tech debt created inconsistency.
The goal wasn’t just visual alignment—it was experience alignment. We wanted contractors to spend time being better at their craft, not better at using our app.
As I wrote in the strategy:
“Our design debt is coming due. Let’s pay it back and boost our metaphorical credit score.”
Unifying Our Voice
We also introduced content and tone guidelines to unify how CompanyCam “sounded.” Consistent messaging builds trust, and for a product rooted in reliability, that mattered just as much as visual consistency.
🧠 Execution and Evangelism
To make the strategy actionable, I translated it into a living Notion hub within the Product Design space—linking each pillar to initiatives, metrics, and owners.
I launched it through a narrative deck and presentation that blended vision, storytelling, and concrete actions.
This wasn’t a top-down document. It became a shared roadmap for growth, referenced in team rituals, onboarding, and planning sessions throughout the year.
We also wove the strategy into broader initiatives:
Continuous Discovery Habits to build consistency in generative research.
Dovetail repository expansion to democratize research insights.
Design System audits to support engineering scale and product consistency.
🌟 Impact
By mid-year, the effects were tangible:
UX Research cadence stabilized, with consistent feedback loops and visibility across teams.
Dovetail became a company-wide resource instead of a design-only tool.
Designers began proactively partnering with PMs earlier in discovery.
The Slab team delivered new component documentation that improved velocity and clarity.
Cross-functional partners began citing design insights in planning and prioritization discussions.
We also saw an uptick in product adoption metrics tied to design-led improvements, like the 20% increase in usage of Pages, which aligned with our renewed emphasis on cohesive user experiences.
💬 Reflection
This strategy marked a turning point for our design organization. It wasn’t about grand gestures or massive restructures; it was about building intentional growth into our everyday practice.
We stopped defining success as “finishing designs” and started defining it as helping CompanyCam design better decisions. By focusing on growth—of our people, our practices, and our partnerships—we built the foundation for the design organization we wanted to become.
📘 Takeaways
Strategic design starts with clarity. Defining what growth meant to us aligned everyone around a shared language.
Culture change happens through storytelling. Evangelizing design built advocacy across Product, Engineering, and Leadership.
Consistency compounds. Every system, voice guideline, and metric added up to a stronger, more trusted experience, for both our team and our customers.