AppX
AppX (Y Combinator S21) was struggling with declining engagement on a creator dashboard used by over a million users. Through deep discovery, workflow simplification, and a rebuilt design system, I drove a 43% engagement lift without adding a single new feature.
The Brief
AppX is a Y Combinator-backed EdTech platform that lets educators and creators build online courses, membership sites, and digital products. After their Series A raise, the creator dashboard — the core product surface — was visibly straining under its own growth.
The product had been built fast. Features were layered without a coherent information architecture, navigation patterns were inconsistent across platforms, and creators were increasingly writing in to support to do things that should have taken two clicks.
— AppX Head of Product
I joined through the acquisition of Superpage and served as Senior Product Manager, leading a 12-person team across technology, sales, social and content. I owned roadmap decisions, experiments and outcome measurement for the creator-facing product.
My mandate: diagnose the usability issues, design a new system from the ground up, and ship iteratively without disrupting the 1M+ users already in-product daily.
Problems Identified
Design Process
Conducted 12 moderated user interviews with creators across verticals (education, fitness, business coaching). Reviewed 3 months of Hotjar recordings to identify rage-click hotspots and drop-off patterns. Analysed support ticket themes with the CX team to create a quantified problem stack.
Card-sorted the full feature set with 20 existing creators to identify their mental models. Restructured the IA around three core jobs-to-be-done: Create, Manage, and Grow. Reduced primary navigation depth from 4 levels to 2.
Built a component library from scratch in Figma — covering 60+ components with variants, states, and accessibility annotations. Established design tokens (colour, spacing, typography) mapped to CSS variables for dev handoff in Figma Dev Mode.
Built interactive high-fidelity prototypes for the 5 highest-impact flows. Ran two rounds of unmoderated usability tests (n=30 per round via Maze) and iterated on findings before dev handoff. Measured task completion rate from 58% to 91% on core flows.
Shipped in 6 two-week sprint cycles alongside two engineers. Used feature flags to roll out changes progressively, monitoring engagement and error rates per feature. Maintained a living design spec with inline Loom annotations for complex interactions.
Impact & Results
Measured over a 90-day post-launch window across the full creator base. Feature flags allowed us to A/B test the new dashboard flows against the legacy UI before full rollout.
Key Learnings
Product ownership and business outcomes
As Senior Product Manager, I owned roadmap decisions, experiments and measurement across a platform serving 1M+ active users. I led a 12-person team and tested how Superpage capabilities could fit into the AppX product line.
The work reduced churn by 12% and acquisition costs by 30%. Alongside the dashboard relaunch, I took Superpage to mobile and launched it on Google Play.
Have something in mind?
Let's make it work.
Ex-Founder, Product Manager & Designer. Based in Dubai.