Founding Designer
0→1 building a real-time meeting assistant before AI was cool at Ciara
Ciara was a digital meeting assistant for inside sales teams (think Granola specifically for sales), and I was the founding designer. This was my first true 0→1 experience—joining at the very beginning to help shape what the product could become.
As the sole designer working directly with the founders, I wore every hat: user researcher, product manager, product designer, and marketing designer. We were figuring out product-market fit in real-time, which meant rapid prototyping, constant user testing, and being comfortable with extreme ambiguity.
Ciara was slightly ahead of its time technologically. I prototyped many of the interaction patterns we see today in LLM chatbots—inline suggestions, real-time feedback on voice and tone—to help salespeople during real-time conversations, but we didn't have the models to follow through with experiences that would do most of the heavy lifting for the user.