Uptime App
The bite-sized learning app. Head of Product Design, seven years. Built it (hands-on) 0 to 1, took it from a B2C app to a B2B platform, led a team of 8. Hands-on the whole way: senior IC craft, team leadership, and a founder's remit across product, proposition and growth.
TL;DR
I joined when Uptime was an idea about cutting the best moments out of internet videos and stitching them into expert-led playlists. Seven years later it was a platform with 2,000+ enterprise customers. The visual Hack format Jean Cambruzzi and I created is what made that possible.
Millions of learners, serious funding, a consumer habit app turned into something businesses pay for. Three remits at once: Head of Product Design, product lead for Proposition, oversight of Growth.
Key successes
• Invented the visual Hack format with Jean Cambruzzi, roughly 3x more engaging, and turned the a-ha moment it created into our north-star metric • Built Spark and Spark Repetition into a retention engine: 1.6x Day 1, close to 4x Day 7, around 5x app usage for engaged users • Won the argument for a bold redesign with evidence, not opinion; Apple, Google and Fast Company recognition followed • Drove monetisation strategy with Christian Vasile and Léa Samrani: 100+ A/B tests across paywalls, onboarding and first-Hack journeys, including proof that our free trial was losing us money • Designed Hackbot and the enterprise layer behind the B2C to B2B shift: Optum, State Street, 2,000+ enterprise customers • Grew the product design team from 2 to 7 and led 8 across product
Jump to
Seven years in one page. Jump to the part that matters to you.
Product-market fit: the shift that changed the product
Business problem: we pivoted into a crowded market late, with nothing that made anyone choose us over Blinkist or Headway. User problem: text and audio summaries assume you'll concentrate. Real people skim, drift and forget. Video was expensive to scale and we stopped it during COVID. We pivoted to books, courses and documentaries. I turned a Hack into something closer to an Instagram story with meaning: intro, three insights, in action, conclusion, carried by audio, visuals and text together. Jean and I shaped the format. I drew it and built the visual execution. We didn't bet the company on taste. All three formats shipped. We validated the story format cheaply, freelance illustrators on top-tier Hacks only. Roughly 3x more engaging. So we changed the default and removed nothing. The real signal came later. People stuck the moment they opened their first Hack. "Hack opened" became our north-star metric.
You can optimise a funnel all day. It won't hold anyone if the thing at the end doesn't land. This one did.
Visual design: fixing what people felt before what they did
Business problem: in a category where every product looks the same, looking the same is a decision, and it was costing us awareness. User problem: people couldn't tell what Uptime was for by looking at it. The initial UI tested as generic, so I set a principle the team could build against: we hide with shapes to reveal effortless knowledge. Bold on purpose, challenger-brand thinking, the Monzo and Airbnb playbook of getting loud first. Not everyone agreed, including at the top. So I built evidence. 28 people, UK and US, 14 on the old design and 14 on the new, unmoderated, same questions. The old one came back generic and busy. The new one came back Fun, Curious, Energetic, Friendly. Exactly the personality we were aiming for. For the build: a POC so the direction was tangible, then a phased rollout with the lights kept on. Plus the micro-interactions that make an app feel considered rather than functional.
Millions of downloads followed. 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. The awards matter for one reason: you can't sell a learning product to a company by promising employees will enjoy it. You have to have proven they already do.
Retention: Spark, found through a failure
Business problem: retention was flat, and the pressure was to copy the industry's answer rather than find ours. User problem: nothing on Uptime belonged to the user, so there was nothing to come back to. Founders and investors wanted daily usage. Duolingo had made streaks the industry's answer. I raised a concern: a language lesson is a snack, a book summary is a meal, and people don't eat meals on a streak schedule. A concern isn't data, so we built streaks properly and gave them a real shot. Nothing moved. Buried in that failure was the insight. Our users came back weekly, and that was the natural cadence of real learning, not a motivation problem. So we built for it. When someone reacts to content they believe in, they start building their own space, a knowledge chest. Spark let people save the insights they believed in. I led Proposition wearing the PM hat and the design hat, designed the first versions, and the team took them forward. 1.6x Day 1. Roughly 2x Day 2 to 3. Close to 4x Day 7. Then Spark Repetition, spaced repetition built on top and grounded in the same learning science as the format, brought engaged users back on that weekly rhythm. Around 5x app usage.
A failed test that teaches you your product's real rhythm is worth more than a successful one that flatters the roadmap.
Monetisation: testing the defaults
Business problem: grow revenue per user without damaging the thing that made people stay. User problem: people were signing up without really deciding to pay, and we didn't know it yet. Not a solo effort. Christian Vasile, Senior Product Designer, and Léa Samrani, Lead Product Manager, and I treated it like any design problem: instrument the chain from trial started to renewal, set guardrails, test everything. More than 100 A/B tests. Paywalls, onboarding journeys, the paths to a first Hack, plan structures, pricing. The biggest finding was counterintuitive. Every subscription app runs a free trial, so we tested whether that default held for us. It didn't. The trial converted worse than asking for payment upfront, the payers it produced cancelled more in their first week, and revenue per signed-up user fell by roughly a quarter. It was manufacturing weak commitments. We killed it. A later variant won over 3x more card commitments, a clear success on the money dashboard. The guardrails showed it quietly stealing users from opening their first Hack.
We designed the metric set for exactly that trap. Money metrics on one side, first-Hack metrics on the other. Monetisation was never allowed to win by cannibalising the product.
B2C to B2B: from a loved app to a product businesses buy
Business problem: consumer subscriptions alone wouldn't get us to the numbers, and building a separate enterprise product would have sunk us. User problem: employees ignore corporate learning because the content is dull and the tools are a chore. We came at it from the opposite direction. We had an app people liked using, awards and all, and the question was whether that affection could become something a business pays for across thousands of employees. The call was structural. We stopped treating B2C and B2B as two products. One platform, with B2B as a way of distributing it. No bespoke builds per client. That layer is where my work went. Single sign-on and a secure company network. A way for a business to turn its own onboarding, wellbeing or compliance material into the same five-minute format people already came back for. Branded spaces, content split by team, reporting so an L&D lead could see what was landing. In 24 languages. The pitch 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 made that argument before we said a word.
Uptime went into Optum and State Street, used for compliance, wellbeing and internal comms, the same Hack format carrying all of it.
AI: Hackbot, keeping the human in charge
Business problem: enterprise only scales if customers can get their own content in without us building it for them. User problem: an L&D lead has piles of legacy material and neither the time nor the design skill to turn it into something people will open. Drop in a document, a URL, a video or some audio, and the system drafts a Hack in the Uptime format. My job was the flow, not the magic. 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, which maps straight onto Insights and Insights in Action. The principle was lower the floor, don't lower the ceiling. Simple by default, with an Advanced Mode to tune tone of voice, emphasis and source images. The output is always a draft for review, never auto-published. Then publishing controls and auto-translation into 24 languages.
Hackbot is where legacy business content becomes something people want to learn from. It's the moment a business becomes a customer.
Results: where it landed
Millions of learners. Tens of millions invested. Two thousand plus enterprise customers.
What's not on this page
Seven years is a lot for one page. Left out: the user acquisition and growth experiments, the research framework I set up so the team could run their own studies, and the constant optimisation that keeps a product alive after launch. More recently, how I use AI in my own process. It can't design a large, living library on its own, but with a solid design.md as the source of truth it gets me a long way. References and rough first passes, then I take those to finished myself. Same with research, faster to set up and sift through, me still making the calls. Same principle as Hackbot.
Across seven years I've had a hand in strategy, marketing, acquisition, monetisation and optimisation as well as design. That breadth is what I'd most want to talk through in person, because a portfolio page can't really hold it.