Leather

Who are they?

Leather is a startup that aims to bring unheard voices to the forefront through a new sound experience. This experience adds a new layer to current media and entertainment by offering short-form interactive audio through a mobile app.

What was the brief?

The task was to conceptualise and design an audio-based app experience that has never been designed before. The existing examples in the market were primitive and only scratched the surface of the concept's potential.

What did you deliver?

When our founder/designer Ece, took on the project, she started by doing competitor landscape analysis, product research, and MVP design. Over time, her role evolved into a product design and management role. She completed the product design, investor deck, and product management, as well as product testing services.

When the project was taken on, it was still just an abstract idea. The engineers had only just begun working on the algorithm, and although the development team had been hired, no screen designs had been created yet. Therefore, it was crucial to start the process to avoid wasting the startup's early investments. To build an MVP, Ece started by conducting research on sound-based experiences, performing a competitive analysis, creating proto-personas and holding branding and feature prioritisation workshops.

Once the movement and flow were established, she worked with the other two other designers on the team to create mood boards that would help team visualise the potential appearance of the brand. From there, they designed the minimum viable product (MVP), which resulted in the startup securing another investment.

A few months later, what began as a part-time product design journey evolved into a product design and management role at the request of the founders. As a team, they added other features to the product roadmap based on the decision of the board. Here are some screenshots and images from those experiences.

Ece is a master of Notion, skilled in documenting and organising data in a meaningful way using the app. As a product designer, she has observed numerous product managers and owners in action, and has created task tickets and documentation based on the best practices she learned from each of them. To further improve her skills as a product manager, she later completed a 40-hour product management course from General Assembly.

Lessons learned

Despite all the hard work put into the app, it sadly never made it to the app store and wasn't introduced to an actual user, even after two years of development (I know...). As members of the team, we still do not know what happened to this day (only the founders know:). However, that doesn't make this experience any less valuable, and we surely learned some strong lessons from it.

Some of these lessons include:

Be welcoming and helpful by creating a dedicated space and time for teammates to be included in planning and design. Ensure that everyone feels heard, both individually and as a team. Be an ally and support your colleagues.
Make retros a fun and open place that people look forward to attending. Take immediate action when they report frustrations or provide negative feedback, and let them know that their feedback is valued.
Be clear about the goals of the product and its implementation. Documentation is a valuable tool for remote teams, especially those in different time zones, but it is important to not rely on the assumption that they will read it in its entirety. 🙂
Say "no" more often to CEOs. Incomplete sprints may not break the company, but a burnt-out team certainly will.
This advice is not only for product management or design, but for any role: don't be afraid to ask difficult questions and have difficult conversations.

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