Took a neuroscience platform from prototype to 10+ paying organizations, as sole designer.

NERON is a brain performance platform built on cognitive-motor integration research: a native mobile product that measures brain performance and turns each result into a personal Brain Dynamics Signature. I joined as the sole product designer with a mandate to move the platform from an early prototype to a product that could sell itself.

Over four months I owned user experience, product strategy, the product-led growth funnel, the go-to-market system, developer handoff documentation, and the client success workflows. I worked alongside ten internal team members and a five-person offshore development team, and every deliverable described here shipped to production within the engagement.

NERON had a strong neuroscience engine, but it was trapped in a clunky prototype and a growth model that could not scale. Every conversion required an employee to be physically present, which made the sales-led model expensive and slow. The prototype also carried functional bugs and user-experience gaps, and an early architectural constraint was blocking multi-organization deployment. There was no self-serve path from the website to the app, and there was no repeatable way to onboard an enterprise client.

I began by running the full assessment flow myself and producing a severity-rated, screen-by-screen analysis of the product. That audit documented the functional bugs and user-experience gaps, and it surfaced the constraint that was blocking multi-organization deployment. I presented a prioritized redesign roadmap to the CEO and CTO, and it set the direction for the entire engagement.

In parallel, I mapped three acquisition tracks (inbound and product-led, outbound and sales-led, partner and referral) and identified six structural gaps blocking self-serve growth. I documented them in journey maps, a prioritized roadmap, and a forty-one-item asset checklist, so the whole company could see exactly what was missing.

This was the heart of the engagement. I designed the complete product-led growth funnel so the product could convert users without a salesperson in the room. The path runs from a website call to action, through zero-friction trial account creation, into the first in-app assessment, and on to a Stripe-integrated upgrade checkout. The web flows adapt to the visitor based on their authentication state, so a new visitor, a trial user, and a returning member each see the right next step. The CEO approved this model at the company all-hands, and it became the foundation for the paid pilots that followed.

The onboarding screens went through two tools, deliberately. Early ideas started in Claude Design, where I wrote detailed prompts describing the interaction model, tone, and content I was after — welcome modals, workflow explainers, spotlight walkthroughs — and got working concepts back that I could react to and re-prompt. Articulating what I wanted precisely enough for the AI to build it turned out to be a design exercise in itself: every round of prompting forced me to sharpen my own thinking before any pixel-level work began.

Once a direction held up, I moved into Figma to dial in the final screens: the brand's type and colour system, real layout grids, and every state the development team would need. The board below is one of the actual exploration canvases from that first phase.

The original plan for onboarding was a chain of twenty-four tooltips and spotlights layered over the interface. I replaced it with an eleven-screen conversational wizard that shipped to production. The wizard reduces cognitive load by asking one thing at a time, and it does three jobs at once: it collects the practitioner profile data the platform needs, it teaches the user the neuroscience framework behind the product, and it sets expectations for the first assessment. I handed the build to the development team with a specification that included complete data mapping and the conditional logic for every branch.

The Brain Dynamics Signature is the platform's core differentiator and its primary conversion trigger, so I treated it as the centre of the experience. I restructured the information hierarchy so the Brain Score reads as the dominant metric, with Agility and Adaptivity sitting in a compact secondary row. I specified the comparison toggle, the population norm ranges, and the zone colour mapping, and the clinical copy was reviewed by the company's PhD-level science lead. Because no competitor offered anything equivalent, this screen became the anchor for the entire growth funnel.

I designed the flow that carries a user from their first score to the moment they decide to pay. After the assessment, the user sees their Brain Dynamics Score, moves through a three-dimensional Signature reveal, and arrives at the upgrade prompt. A guided first-look sequence walks them through the result one card at a time, and its zone-specific copy changes across five performance tiers, so the message a high performer sees is different from the message a struggling user sees, and each one leads naturally toward the upgrade.

The training experience needed to serve two very different audiences at once, so I designed it with two coexisting modes: a clinical, practitioner-facing display, and an engagement-focused experience for consumers. The two modes share the same screens but change their icons and copy through conditional logic, which I specified across six screens so the development team could build both from a single source of truth.

Beyond the app, I built the web presence that feeds it. I designed six vertical-market pages for distinct audiences (sports, aging, fitness, workplace, healthcare, and research), each with an audience-specific colour palette and editorial voice. I produced five product-led growth web pages and three email templates that form the bridge from the website to the first in-app assessment, delivered against a locked visual standard at desktop and mobile widths.

I also enforced terminology governance across every touchpoint, auditing each deliverable against the company's canonical brand language and correcting systemic mismatches in wording, role naming, and trademark usage.

To let the company grow without adding headcount, I designed and delivered the complete onboarding and deployment system for enterprise clients: a five-document deployment suite, a facility-specific staff training guide, a training deck with visual guidelines, and family-facing communication materials.

I first proved the framework with a memory care provider operating two locations, then extended it to a national defence research agency with a team of fifteen neuroscientists, and then to additional partner organizations in the aging and brain-health space. I mapped the client journey from signed contract to independently operating organization, identified six structural gaps, and designed staged training paths and escalation frameworks so the company needs to be physically present only once, for kickoff. That design let the company scale from a single pilot client to more than ten without adding staff.

The development team worked offshore and across time zones, so my specifications had to remove any need for interpretation. I authored zero-ambiguity handoff documents for every major initiative: the setup wizard, the Brain Dynamics Signature, the training modes, and the post-assessment flow. Each document carried complete data mapping, the conditional logic for every state, and integration guidance, and each one was implemented in production by the five-person offshore team with no design questions coming back.

To position the product, I benchmarked more than eight competitors, including Creyos, Oura, WHOOP, Lumosity, Elevate, and BrainHQ, and organized the findings into structured comparison tables that informed the member report design, the growth positioning, and the conversion strategy. The most important finding: the Brain Dynamics Signature had no equivalent in any competitor product. That insight is what led me to anchor the entire funnel around the Signature as the moment of realization for a new user.

Within a four-month contract, the platform went from a prototype to a production product that began onboarding paying early-access customers, supported by a web funnel and an enterprise deployment system that could both grow on their own. Between ten and twelve organizations were onboarded for paid pilots on the new self-serve system.

Being the only designer in a fifteen-person company meant owning the whole chain, from product strategy down to the pixels, and then out to the developer specifications and the client rollout. I learned to translate design intent into specifications precise enough for a remote team to build without a single question, and to design systems, both the onboarding wizard and the enterprise deployment framework, that scale without adding people. The Brain Dynamics Signature is the through-line: it is the product's most distinctive idea, and the entire funnel now leads a new user toward that one moment.