Icon was a startup venture focused on helping organizations create private digital communities where members could connect through messaging, events, and subscriptions.
As Lead Product Designer, I led product strategy, information architecture, UX, UI, and the design system from concept through investor-ready MVP.
The challenge wasn't designing another messaging application. Organizations — from universities and athletic programs to brands and gig-worker networks — needed flexible community spaces with different permissions, memberships, privacy settings, and communication models.
Public, private, and secret communities plus nested groups all had to coexist inside a single, coherent product model.
Direct messaging, group conversations, live events, and in-person events each carried different expectations for presence, notification, and permission.
Subscription-based memberships and flexible permissions had to feel native to the community rather than bolted onto it.
The goal was making all of this feel intuitive — powerful for administrators without overwhelming everyday members.
Organizations relied on disconnected tools for messaging, events, announcements, and memberships.
One unified platform that adapts to public, private, and secret communities without added complexity.
An investor-ready MVP that unified community management, messaging, events, and monetization.
Final product imagery is being prepared. Each panel below documents the surface, the problem it solves, and the outcome it delivered.
Members had no single place to see what was happening across their community.
Reduced context switching between disconnected tools.
Every surface ships from a shared system — tokens, components, and patterns documented so future teams can extend the product without re-deriving its rules.
The final deliverable was an investor-ready MVP demonstrating how organizations could create communities, manage members, host conversations, launch events, and offer subscription memberships — communicating both the immediate value proposition and the long-term scalability of the platform.
A unified activity model made a broad feature set feel like one product instead of many.
How much of the perceived complexity came from information architecture rather than interface design.
Strong information architecture often determines whether a product feels intuitive long before visual design begins.
Every case study in this portfolio began with a complex problem, an ambitious team, and a decision to build something better. If you’re solving the next one, I’d love to help.
