Timeline
2018 – 2022 · 0→1 through market launch
My Role
Founding / Lead Designer — first designer on the product, later led a team of five
Impact
Onboarding 15 min → under two minutes · $40M+ raised at a $400M valuation · 100K+ Google Play downloads · 4.1★ App Store (8.5K ratings)
The collar is hardware. The relationship is software.
Challenge
A GPS dog-safety collar going from early-stage startup to market. Onboarding took about 15 minutes, and most of it was video. The founder is one of the leading dog trainers in the US, and the training content was the product's real differentiator — so the requirement was that every new owner watch it in full, no skipping. The intent was right: an owner who doesn't understand the training method will misuse the collar, and with a containment product that has real consequences. But someone who has just unboxed an expensive device wants to see it work. Fifteen minutes of unskippable video before the first fence meant many never reached the fence at all. The hard part wasn't the interface. It was that the requirement came from genuine domain expertise, and arguing against it meant arguing with the person who knew dogs best.
MY ACTIONS
1. Designed the 0→1 product end-to-end. First designer on the product — mobile app from concept through market launch, working directly with the hardware and ML teams to translate device constraints into product decisions. 2. Made the training content skippable. I proposed letting owners skip videos and return to them later, keeping the content one tap away rather than mandatory up front. The argument wasn't that the training didn't matter — it was that an owner who abandons setup watches none of it, while an owner who reaches a working fence comes back for it. Getting that accepted took evidence and repetition, not a better mockup. 3. Field-tested the hardware, not just the screens. The engineering team asked me to run signal-accuracy tests with my own dog on an early prototype — several days of walking real routes and checking where GPS held and where it drifted. Designing a containment product without knowing how the signal behaves in the physical world produces interfaces that promise more than the hardware delivers. 4. Led design across five rotating designers, staying hands-on through the hardest stages rather than delegating them.
Solution
Onboarding dropped from about 15 minutes to under two minutes — the training content stayed in the product, but stopped being a gate in front of it. The product raised $40M+ at a $400M valuation, reached 100K+ Google Play downloads and 4.1★ on the App Store across 8.5K ratings.
What I'd Do Differently
I won the skip argument with reasoning, and it took longer than it should have. What would have settled it in a week was data — a simple drop-off measurement showing where in the video sequence people left. I had the argument right and the evidence thin, and with a founder who knew the domain better than I did, that's the wrong way round.