An AI-driven news app designed around three value propositions — Content First, Easy Digest, Simplify Everything — shipped on time and on budget.
I led the product end-to-end as Product Owner and founding designer: aligning a distributed stakeholder team (CSO, CEO, CTO, plus part-time developers), defining the product logic, and shipping the launch version of the app to iOS.
How do you synchronize stakeholder ideas in product design?
Design based on logic and value proposition — not on the loudest voice in the room.
The founding team brought strong but divergent product intuitions. I set three value propositions as the filter — Content First, Easy Digest, Simplify Everything — and used working prototypes to validate ideas against them before spec.
- Establish value propositions early; use them as the decision filter
- Build working prototypes so debate happens against an artifact, not an abstraction
- Apply upward management using the value-proposition frame, not opinions
How do you make the product feel AI-driven?
Three moves made the AI legible to users:
- AI-generated illustrations for every article
- AI-condensed headlines (5 words) and summaries (44 words)
- AI-curated comment aggregation per story
How do you grow with zero marketing budget?
Growth came from frictionless entry and share-driven discovery:
- OAuth-only sign-in (Google / Apple) to cut account-creation friction
- Shareable web preview — tapped outside the app, then redirected to the App Store
Managing a part-time, mixed-experience dev team.
Launching on a hard deadline with part-time developers meant communicating purpose, not just tickets. I leaned on Jira + Notion + Figma as the shared surface, and wrote detailed specs so engineers could ship without waiting on me.
Shipped Oct 18, 2023. Zero-marketing climb.
Launched on time with zero complaints across post-launch surveys in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the US — and climbed the App Store charts on share-driven growth alone.
