Guiding Ember's rebuild for personalised discovery

Ember, a London discovery app initially built on Unity, faced critical technical limitations that hampered product growth and user experience. Recognising this, the business planned a rebuild in React Native. However, I strategically advocated for a step back to unify our team's purpose before proceeding. This foundational work paved the way for a highly successful rebuild, resulting in over 80% of existing users returning and a rapid acquisition of new users, climbing to 25,000 within weeks, alongside significantly improved reviews and feedback.

The original plan was for the tech team to rebuild the existing app in React Native, while the design team explored gamification enhancements. However, I challenged this direction, recognising a deeper opportunity: to step back and reframe the problem. I believed a shared understanding of our purpose was essential to guide not just gamification, but the entire rebuild strategy.

Recognising the critical need for a unified vision, I proactively designed and led a 'Just Cause' workshop with our entire 25-person team. This session aimed to move beyond immediate feature requests and establish a foundational understanding of our business's purpose and guiding principles. Through a series of collaborative brainstorming activities (facilitated using a Figjam board, as visualised below), we collectively defined our 'Just Cause': 'We imagine a future where every week you and your friends can find new personalised things to do, wherever you may be.' This foundational statement was further supported by the identification of our core values: personalisation, discovery, community, creation, and fulfilment, providing a clear compass for all future product decisions.

Driven by our 'Just Cause,' we prioritised understanding our existing users' core frustrations. Through a user-centered approach, we developed key personas and conducted usability testing with 8 participants. Our analysis of these sessions and follow-up interviews revealed a significant pain point: users like Ava, an outgoing young professional, felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of options, hindering their ability to discover personalized experiences and undermining the app's intended purpose.

Building upon our unified vision and user insights, we moved into the wire-framing phase, focusing on the core app experience while strategically aligning with our core values. Over two weeks, we engaged in active iteration, presenting and refining wireframes based on cross-functional feedback. The tech team provided crucial input on feasibility, ensuring our designs were technically sound, while the content team played a key role in shaping features that emphasised our social and personalisation values.

Though the core product stayed similar to our previous version, our new just cause gave us clear direction for planning and prioritising initial features. After completing the base wireframes, we received rough estimates from the tech team. The design team then worked with the Product Manager to plan and prioritise feature development. With the scope of the first sprint confirmed we began identifying what components we will need to build the high-fidelity screens with, we also set up the colour scheme and font system so the tech team had the correct primitive colors and naming conventions to begin with.

Building on our user-centric exploration, we proactively established a core design system with reusable UI components and consistent visual styles (color palette and typography). This early efficiency measure streamlined collaboration with the tech team, providing them with essential building blocks from the outset. To further optimise the development process, we collaborated with the tech team before detailed design specifications, incorporating their valuable insights on feasibility. Following this feedback loop, we finalised the designs, jointly estimated development tickets, and delivered comprehensive documentation. This efficient initial handover, facilitated by the early design system and strong tech collaboration, enabled us to run four subsequent feature-specific sprints, with the design team consistently staying one sprint ahead to support the development pipeline and manage technical debt.

The rebuilt Ember app launched with significant success, marked by over 80% existing user return and rapid new user growth to 25,000 within weeks. Critically, the move to React Native delivered a much-improved app performance, unlocking a 4x acceleration in development speed and feature deployment. This technical achievement, coupled with positive user feedback and reviews, provided a strong platform for future expansion and solidified the success of the strategic rebrand and rebuild.