Uptime App
The bite-sized learning product. Head of Product Design, seven years. Built it 0 to 1, took it from a B2C app to a B2B platform, led a team of 8.
TL;DR
I joined when Uptime was an idea about video playlists curated by experts. I left after we'd grown to millions of learners, raised serious funding, landed enterprise clients, and turned a consumer habit app into a platform businesses pay for. Three remits at once: head product designer for the product team, product owner for Proposition team, and oversight of Growth.
The shift that changed the product
The original Uptime was video, stitched into expert playlists that helped you learn new concepts and learning journeys. Expensive to scale, and we stopped it during COVID. We pivoted to books, courses and documentaries, but by then we were late next to Headway and Blinkist. We needed a reason to exist. That reason became the visual summary. I took my own visual and presentation style, with animations and turned a Hack into something closer to an Instagram story with meaning: intro, three insights, in action, a conclusion, carried by audio, visuals, and text together so people actually retained it based on scientific reasoning (The Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML)). Jean Cambruzzi and I shaped the format together; I drew it and built the visual execution.
The result was a format roughly 3x more engaging than what we had before. That format became the thing everything else hung off.
Spark: turning a feature into a retention engine
Spark let people save the insights they believed in. Sounds small. It wasn't. The insight I kept coming back to: when someone reacts to content they genuinely believe in, they start building their own space on Uptime, a knowledge chest. It's the "like on Facebook" moment. But knowledge, once it's yours, you come back. I led the Proposition team, designed the first versions, and the team took them forward.
Spark lifted Day 1 retention by 1.6x, day 2–3 retention roughly 2x, day 7 retention close to 4x. Then Spark Repetition, spaced repetition built on top of Spark, pushed app usage for engaged users to around 5x, bringing them back weekly, one of the most important KPIs we had.
The visual: fixing what people felt before what they did
The initial UI tested as generic. People couldn't tell us what Uptime was for by looking at it. So I set a design principle the whole team could build against: we hide with shapes to reveal effortless knowledge. We went bold on purpose, challenger-brand thinking, the Monzo and Airbnb playbook of getting loud for awareness, then settling. We tested it properly: 28 people, UK and US, 14 on the old design and 14 on the new. The old one came back generic and busy. The new one came back Fun, Curious, Energetic, Friendly. This was also when we brought the app to life with micro-interactions and animations, the small moments that make something feel considered rather than functional. That's the difference between an app you use and one you actually like opening. The bet paid off. The new look made us stand out instead of blending into the category, it pulled in millions of downloads, and it earned recognition from Apple for the visuals, which is about the clearest outside signal you can get that the work landed.
The recognition kept coming. App of the Day and Apps We Love 2021 from Apple, Best New Apps of 2021 from Fast Company, App of the Year 2021 from Google. Awards are nice, but the reason they mattered comes later: you can't sell a learning product to a company by promising employees will enjoy it. You have to have already proven they do. We had.
Creating your own Hacks: pragmatic AI that keeps the human in charge
This is the B2B turning point. Drop in a document, a URL, a video or some audio, and the system drafts a Hack in the Uptime format. Two routes, by design. Create it for me does the heavy lifting. Or a guided Q&A, voice or text, walks you through point by point: tell me what you want to cover, then for each key point, the detail and the practical actions a reader could apply. That maps straight onto the Uptime format. The principle was lower the floor, don't lower the ceiling. Simple by default, with an Advanced Mode for power users to tune tone of voice, emphasis, whether to pull source images, and where to point the Insights in Action. And the output is always a draft for review, never auto-published. The human stays in control. Then publishing controls and auto-translation into 23+ languages, including audio.
Thist is where business content becomes something people actually want to learn from, it brings legacy content to life, and it's the moment a business becomes a customer.
From a loved app to a product businesses buy
This is the shift I'm proudest of at a company level, because most consumer apps can't make it. The usual story for a B2B learning product is grim: a company buys an LMS, employees ignore it, and "completion" becomes a box-ticking exercise nobody enjoys. We were coming at it from the opposite direction. We had an app people genuinely liked using, awards and all, and the question was whether that affection could become something a business would pay for across thousands of employees. The key call was structural, and I'll take no credit for inventing it but plenty for building toward it: we stopped treating B2C and B2B as two products. There was one platform. B2B became a way of distributing it, not a separate thing to maintain. That decision is what kept it sane. No bespoke builds per client, the same product everyone already loved, just with the layer a company needs wrapped around it. That layer is where my work went. Single sign-on and a secure company network. The ability for a business to take its own training, onboarding or compliance material and turn it into the same five-minute format people already came back for, which is exactly what Hackbot unlocked. Branded spaces, content split by team, reporting so an L&D lead could see what was actually landing. Twenty-four languages so a global workforce wasn't an afterthought. The pitch to a buyer wasn't "here's another tool." It was "replace the stack of things your employees avoid with the one thing they already open." The consumer awards did the hard part of that argument before we said a word.
It worked. Uptime went from a B2C app into enterprises like Optum and State Street, used for everything from compliance to wellbeing to internal comms, the same Hack format carrying all of it.
Where it landed
Millions of learners. Tens of millions invested. Two thousand plus enterprise customers.
There's more from where this came from
Seven years is a lot to fit on one page. I've left out at least as much as I've put in: the monetisation strategy and paywall work, the user acquisition and growth experiments, the research framework I set up so the whole team could run their own studies, and the constant optimisation that keeps a product alive once it's launched. Some of the work lately has been in how I use AI in my own process. AI still can't design using a large, living library on its own, but with a solid design.md as the source of truth it can get me a long way: I use it to generate references and rough first passes, then take those to a finished state myself. It speeds the early part up without pretending it can do the part that still needs a designer's hands. Same with research, faster to set up and sift through, with me still making the calls. The principle is the one behind Hackbot: let AI lower the floor, never let it take the human out of the decision.
Across seven years I've had a hand in the strategy, the marketing, the acquisition, the monetisation and the optimisation, not just the design. That breadth is the thing I'd most want to talk through in person, because it's the part a portfolio page can't really hold.