Designing a product, without the product

Our team undertook this project amidst the challenges of the COVID era. This meant that we had limited access to our hardware prototypes for the foreseeable future. As a result, we had to rely on assumptions, use our imagination, and employ inventive approaches to prototype our design ideas during this period.

Additionally, the absence of precedent for this type of consumer product meant that our design system, the principal component that helped define the product direction, had to be crafted from the ground up, and I was the design manager in charge of this work.

Also, we had recently acquired a new company to join us in this project. This required extensive team-building efforts on my part in a remote work setting.

In this multifaceted role, I contributed as both a dedicated manager and a hands-on designer. I helped address our hypotheses through leading prototyping sprints. Guiding my team through maintaining both their wellbeing and productivity, I ensured our deliverables met the timelines, a task that required ample leeway considering the intricate nature of a hardware product, finally, getting us to a point where the COVID regulations have changed to allow more access to the device and testing.