What is Cedar?
Cedar is an email-first product that helps busy job seekers, particularly those working full-time, discover and apply for tech jobs directly from their inbox.
As a lean, fast-paced startup, we prioritized iterative design to quickly ship an MVP, validate assumptions with real users, and continuously refine the product and the vision with data-driven insights.
Contributions at a Glance
Achievements
Successfully Launched Cedar’s MVP
Delivered a seamless, AI-driven job application experience, achieving key metrics like a 5% paid user conversion rate, high user satisfaction, 35% job recommendations accepted, and an 81% daily email open rate.
Delivered Designs at Scale
Designed over 70 wireframes and high-fidelity mockups, and 30+ user flows, ensuring all designs were visually compelling, scalable, and aligned with both user and development needs, while establishing a robust design system foundation to support future growth and rapid iteration.
User-Centric Design Process
Maintained a continuous focus on user feedback, refining features to minimize friction, boost engagement, and address pain points effectively.
Learnings
Prompt Engineering
Working with conversational AI requires constant adjustments to prompts for optimal user interactions.
Overcoming Resource Constraints
Delivering great designs is only half the job; ensuring flawless implementation within tight resource limits demands creativity and teamwork—something we achieved successfully and in record time, which was essential to raise money.
Building Trust Through Leadership
Establishing trust from the outset by positioning myself as a solution-oriented collaborator, then progressively taking risks, driving initiatives, and becoming the go-to product design leader who facilitates decisions for both leaders and developers, proved essential.
The MVP
Our solution centered on an intuitive, NLP-powered job application process, with an AI agent offering personalized job recommendations and enabling users to apply directly from their inbox.
By leveraging Gmail and other email clients, we eliminated the need for a complex app or authentication, saving significant development time while integrating naturally into users’ workflows. For tasks like browsing recommendations, setting preferences, and refining profiles, we designed a simple, complementary web app.
Problem-Solving with Constraints
I wasn’t just designing screens—I was shaping product strategy and tackling real-world challenges.
In a fast-paced startup with tight budgets and deadlines, I collaborated closely with leadership, leveraging user pain points and insights from the CEO, CTO, and users to shape and refine the product vision through several work sessions I facilitated.
With limited time for in-depth user research, every design decision centered on key opportunities and critical business objectives.
