Playbook – Building a Creative Cloud Storage
2021 - Current
Playbook is a cloud storage platform built for creatives and visual work. I joined Playbook early as employee #6 and Founding Product Designer, owning design across product, systems, and brand as the platform grew from a few thousands users to over 2 million. I had touched nearly every pixel of our product and that kind of ownership changes how I approach design at Playbook. You start thinking more about the full experience, instead of indivdual screen or moment.
Designing inside a fast-paced startup
Early on, I became almost obsessed with understanding every part of it and how it all connected, to the point where I could almost map the full UI of our app in my head. That made it easier to pinpoint where real workflows were running into friction, and from there a lot of the work became figuring out what the product needed to solve those gaps in a way that still felt connected to the overall experience of Playbook.
At Playbook, we wanted to ship fast, but ship it right. So a lot of product intuition had to be built from the signals we have from customer calls, FullStory, and support. I got comfortable making decisions with incomplete information, staying close to engineers so things didn't get lost in the sauce, and iterating when I got something wrong.
The work I'm most proud of from this time isn't any single feature. It's that the product always felt intentional and tasteful, which our users have always noticed.
A lot of the early collaboration work was 0 to 1. I was not just polishing an existing feature set but defining some of the product patterns that other parts of Playbook would later evolve.
Designing for trust (Share & Publish)
Share and Publish used to be the same feature.
You'd open a single modal, and right alongside the link toggle you'd also see limited layout templates, theme options. It made sense conceptually since sharing and presenting are related features. But in practice, the person who just needed to grab a quick link and send it to a client was landing in a flow designed for someone making intentional customization choises. Two very different workflows, one crowded UI.
The fix wasn't just a UI refresh. It was a product decision: seaprate the two workflows entirely. Share becomes frictionless and instant. Publiosh becomes intentional. Splitting them meant redesigning both from scratch, each with a much clearer purpose.
For Share: Every toggle of controls I included was a deliberate call about what Playbook's users actualy need when sharing creative work, versus what would just add noise and complexity. The goal was a set of controls that felt complete to a power users and effortless to someone just hitting share for the first time.
For Publish: The separation gave it room to actually be what it was always trying to be. Publish could focus entirely on presentation. I designed the full template library from scratch. I also redesigned the editor view elements to simplify a dense set of controls down to something that felt managebale and easy to understand.
Outcome: Share became a one-click workflow with just the right amount of control for power users and better clarity for first-timers. Publish became a real tool for showcasing visual work. And for a product that grows when recipients become users, both moment got a lot sharper and more polished.
Mobile app: same product, different beast
The first decision I made about the mobile app was about what to leave out. The easy direction would have been to take the web experience and compress it down to a phone screen. From my obeservation, mobile users often have a different set of needs and they aren't sitting down to reorganize their entire library. They're away from their computer, on set, in a meeting, in transit. Before I even designed anything, I asked a different question: what does Playbook users actually need in those moments?
A lot of the design decisions came down to how people actually move through the app. Upload is a good example. The original flow made you create a board first, go into it, then tap upload (three steps before you'd added anything). I redesigned it so you could create a board and upload in the same flow.
Looking back at everything I touched on mobile, every decision was about getting people to the good part faster. Mobile users don't have the patience for friction the way desktop users can sometime tolerate. The faster someone gets to the moment where it clicks for them, the more likely they're to come back.
Outcome: The mobile app shipped with a focused feature set that matched how people actually use Playbook away from their desks. Be deciding what mobile shouldn't do first, everything it can do felt complete rather than a half-baked version of something else.
Small bets, real impact
How I reimagined our onboarding
The obvious solution was a guided tour with tooltips, but people skipped right through it every time. So instead of building another tutorial nobody would finish, I used a feature we already had and made it the onboarding itself.
New users now get a pre-populated workspace waitring for them on sign up.
Outcome: After launch we saw a clear increase in first time usders uploading assets in their very first session. Getting hands on the product from day one turned out to be more effective than any tutorial we could have built.
How I redesigned our website
At one point it became obvious that our marketing site no longer looked like the product we were building. It has been patched so many times that things had quitely gotten more inconsistent. For a product trying to win over creative professionals and larger teams, that mattered.
I focused on simplyfing the overall messaging, restructuring page heirarchy, and making sure layouts always stay conistent across desktop or mobile. Especially when more than 50% of Playbook's first visitors come from mobile.
I redesigned the whole site and rebuilt it using code, which wasn't something I had done at that scale before. I figured it out as I went and shipped it.
Outcome: The site is live at playbook.com. Clean, responsive, and something we actually feel good sending to customers for the first time.