Mainstay

An AI-based student support messaging platform for higher-ed, levelling the playing field at historic scale to provide under-served communities with equal opportunity in college and beyond.

Strategy Leadership SaaS Design Thinking UX/UI IA Research Identity Lean UX Prototyping Project Management
Mainstay

Mainstay is a market leader in AI-based behavioral intelligence, with a focus on supporting students in higher-ed throughout their journey. Third party studies have shown Mainstay is having a remarkable effect in improving admission, outcomes, and retention for students from less privileged backgrounds, essentially eliminating the difference between these groups and more privileged students who are well supported.

As Director of Product Design at Mainstay, I

  • hired and built the Product Design team

  • reshaped the wider Product team’s workflows and structure around Agile and Lean processes

  • created structures for project management (an outcome-oriented framework for providing value and contextualizing activity and decision making at every level from macro strategic themes and initiatives to micro user stories and acceptance criteria)

  • instituted and ran a regular user testing cadence and iterative workflows to validate initiatives, improve usability, and drive generative insight

  • undertook, socialized and executed an Information Architecture revamp of entire platform, critically necessary to aligning the platform to the sales narrative, paying off design and tech debt, reducing time to value, unlocking lower friction and more approachable, empowering partner success managers to focus on driving goals rather than troubleshooting, and laying the foundation to scale to new verticals

  • created experience principles which drove much of the IA and subtler aspects of the platform and became a point of reference for the wider company

  • visually redesigned the platform UI for a more modern, organic, approachable feel

  • hired for and oversaw creation of design systems and component library, ensuring platform-wide accessibility, speed of design and engineering workflows, and a much-improved sales demo experience

  • contributed as a designer on complex SaaS UX/UI, from napkin sketch through to engineering QA at every level of fidelity

  • designed and ran workshops and Design Thinking exercises with multiple teams across the company to help inform strategic roadmaps and product direction

  • mentored Junior and Senior Designers

  • moved the team to an ‘agency model’ for more creative exchange than the ‘pod’ or ‘embedded’ model allows, and incorporated PMs and engineers into this as peer-contributors

  • defined and delivered new product directions based on user insights and business goals.

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Mainstay-Rebrand-MVP.png

ABOVE: visual from a UI overhaul to rebrand the platform.

BELOW: a sample sketching session in FigJam, with a contributing fully remote team of designers, PMs, engineers, and SMEs. We ran a three week sprint cycle, with one week dedicated to discovery (such as this sketching session), testing with between three and five participants recruited from the college staff who use the platform daily, and review/production/handoff with PMs and engineering, respectively. This process combined Design Thinking, Lean UX, and Agile, allowing us to innovate fast and rapidly improve the platform as a whole.

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