The hard part — Catch Up

Two hard parts, and the first one was political.

Our team was drifting. After Talktrack shipped, leadership shifted and the strategy moved out from under us, and we were being treated as the Talktrack team rather than what we actually were — an async collaboration team. We needed a direction and enough credibility to be allowed to pursue it.

The second was the work itself. Once we started designing Catch Up, too many teams had opinions. Conflicting feedback from every direction, scope inflating, and a solution getting more rigid the more people touched it. I wasn't happy with it. Neither was the design review — it didn't go well, and it deserved not to.

I pulled it back. My PM and I agreed to return the work to our smaller team, and I took design leadership of the project. Then I ran open design jams to rebuild the goals and UX vision from something we actually believed in.