B2C Social Platform · Product Strategy · AI · Growth · Design Leadership
At Jodel, I led end-to-end Product Design across a community-driven social platform, working from discovery and strategy through UX/UI, experimentation and delivery.
My role extended beyond hands-on design into design leadership and management, helping shape product direction, coordinate design initiatives and create alignment across multidisciplinary teams. I worked closely with Product, Engineering, Data, Machine Learning and Marketing, balancing user needs, business priorities and technical constraints.
My work focused particularly on growth, engagement and retention, while contributing to design systems, scalable ways of working and the wider evolution of the product experience.
Designing for community, connection and engagement at scale
ROLE
Senior Product Designer
SCOPE
End-to-End Product Design · Design Strategy · Design Management
COLLABORATION
Product · Engineering · Data · ML · Marketing
FOCUS
Growth · Engagement · AI · Design Systems
THE CONTEXT
DESIGN CHALLENGE STATEMENT
Jodel is a location-based social platform built around anonymous, community-driven conversations. Its experience needs to balance spontaneity, discovery and self-expression with clarity, trust and a strong sense of belonging.
As the product evolved, the challenge was not simply to add new features, but to strengthen engagement, discovery and personalization while preserving the simplicity and distinctive identity of the Jodel community
How might we evolve the experience and increase engagement without losing what makes Jodel feel like Jodel?
EVOLVING THE CORE EXPERIENCE
Keeping the identity. Improving the experience.
Jodel's visual language is deeply connected to its product identity. As the experience evolved, I worked on making discovery, navigation and content interaction clearer and more scalable, while preserving the spontaneity and colourful personality of the platform.
Across the feed, post detail and community discovery experiences, I focused on visual hierarchy, intuitive navigation, personalization and reusable interaction patterns, creating greater consistency without making the product feel overly structured
DISCOVERING COMMUNITIES
Making local communities easier to find, understand and join
As Jodel’s community ecosystem grew, discovery needed to become more intuitive and engaging. I redesigned the experience to give communities a stronger visual identity and clearer hierarchy, helping people quickly understand what was relevant to them and explore beyond their existing feed.
The experience combined location, interests and personalization to surface relevant communities while still leaving room for spontaneous discovery, an important part of Jodel’s character.
I especially like “Discovering Communities” because it describes the user experience rather than the UI feature itself. And the second paragraph subtly connects this visual to the broader personalization/AI story that comes later, without prematurely turning this into an AI section.
ACCESSIBILITY MEETS IDENTITY
Designing for comfort without losing character.
Dark mode emerged from both accessibility needs and community feedback. The challenge was to create a calmer, more visually comfortable alternative without losing Jodel's distinctive character, extending the design language rather than simply inverting it.
DESIGNING FOR GROWTH & ENGAGEMENT
From individual features to connected engagement loops
A significant part of my work focused on how people discover, participate in and return to the Jodel community, across onboarding, community discovery, content creation, reactions, rewards and personalization.
Rather than approaching these as isolated features, I looked at them as parts of a connected experience: reducing friction for new users, encouraging meaningful participation and creating feedback loops that support engagement and long-term retention.
Working closely with Product, Data and Engineering, I helped translate user behavior and product priorities into experiences that balanced business goals with genuine value for the community.
AI IN THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE
Designing intelligence without losing the human experience
AI became an important part of improving relevance, discovery and engagement across Jodel. I worked on translating AI capabilities into product experiences that felt useful and intuitive, from feed personalization and adaptive onboarding to contextual assistance within conversations.
The challenge was not simply to make the experience more personalized, but to do so without compromising the exploratory, spontaneous and community-driven nature of the platform
DESIGNING AI RESPONSIBLY
Balancing personalization, trust and technical reality
I worked closely with Machine Learning, Data and Engineering to connect user needs with model capabilities and technical constraints.
Design decisions considered personalization vs. content diversity, privacy and trust, transparency, data quality and model confidence. This required continuous iteration across design and technology to ensure AI-supported experiences remained understandable, scalable and aligned with the community.
For me, designing with AI meant not only asking what could be automated or personalized, but where human control, clarity and choice needed to remain.
DESIGN STRATEGY & LEADERSHIP
Turning complexity into shared direction
My approach combined continuous discovery, experimentation and iterative delivery, bringing together user research, product data, community feedback and technical constraints to guide product decisions.
Beyond designing individual solutions, I helped structure the design process, align priorities and create shared direction across disciplines. Working closely with Product, Engineering, Data, Machine Learning and Marketing, I used design as a tool to connect different perspectives and move teams from ambiguity toward clear decisions.
The process was intentionally flexible, combining Design Thinking, Lean and Agile principles to explore problems, validate ideas early and continuously learn through delivery.
KPIs and ux metricsMEASURING SUCCESS
Connecting design decisions to product and user outcomes
Success was considered from the beginning of the design process, connecting user needs with product and business goals and defining how we would evaluate whether an experience was working.
Depending on the initiative, this meant looking at signals such as activation, engagement, retention, feature adoption and user feedback, combining quantitative product data with qualitative research to understand not only what was happening, but why.
These signals informed ongoing iteration, helping the team identify friction, validate assumptions and decide where to focus next.
EXPLORING BEFORE COMMITTING
Low-fidelity prototyping helped us test assumptions early, challenge interaction patterns and uncover problems before investing in visual detail.
Working quickly at this level supported faster decisions and gave the team space to iterate on hierarchy, flows and feature priorities before moving into high-fidelity design.