YAS.beneFit — MVP Case Study

I joined this project from day one as the lead product designer and project manager — from the initial proposal and concept phase, through the full design process, internal alignment, and all the way to testing and launch. The opportunity came from an unexpected place: a conversation our CEO had with a potential client revealed an untapped market — corporate insurance brokering, combined with our existing gamified wellness platform. The hypothesis was compelling, but the constraints were real.

We had one year to build, test, and ship a product that could sign its first client and prove viability to stakeholders. The new app needed to be meaningfully distinct from what we'd built before, preserve the core features that made our platform work, and remain flexible enough for future client customisation — all with limited time, budget, and engineering capacity.

Rather than jumping straight into design, I organised and led a series of structured hackathon workshops to align the team and ground our decisions in shared understanding.

Across multiple ideation sessions, we worked through Value Proposition Canvases, persona development, and user journey mapping — bringing together perspectives from different departments and surfacing what each stakeholder actually needed from this product. We then prioritised features by development complexity and business impact, building a framework that would guide trade-off decisions as constraints tightened later in the process.

The goal wasn't to design everything at once, it was to make sure that when we had to cut something, we'd know exactly what we were cutting and why.

The biggest design conflict centred on the dashboard — the product's most critical screen and the first thing every user would see.

The existing dashboard needed significant work to meet the new product's needs, but a full rebuild would require engineering refactoring we simply didn't have the time or resources for. As a designer, my instinct was to push for doing it properly, rebuild it now, avoid compounding technical and design debt later. But after working through short, medium, and long-term options with the engineering team, we made a different call.

Instead of a clean-slate redesign, we modularised the key design components within the existing framework. This let us move faster, maintain consistency, and create a design foundation that the team could build on when the refactoring became feasible. It wasn't the ideal solution. But it was the right one for where we were.

Shipping a product that users could actually download and use within the constraints we were working with was itself the milestone. Getting a working MVP from concept to the App Store within the timeline was not a given, and completing that cycle was a meaningful achievement for the team.

Without formal analytics in place at launch, we tracked success through users' behaviour. Active usage climbed from roughly 2–3 sessions per week to at least once daily — a shift that showed up not just in the numbers, but in how quickly popular benefits sold out. When users are redeeming enough to clear inventory, something is working.

In the product's second year, YAS.beneFit signed its first external client — validating the original hypothesis and demonstrating to stakeholders that the MVP had legs beyond internal use.

This was the first time I led a full product development cycle as the primary designer, and it changed how I think about design work entirely.

The clearest shift: I stopped thinking in screens and started thinking in decisions. Every design choice had a product implication, a business consequence, an engineering trade-off. Learning to hold all of that at once, rather than optimising for the interface in isolation, made me a fundamentally different kind of designer.

The other thing I didn't expect to value as much: the facilitation work. Keeping different departments aligned, resolving disagreements without losing momentum, finding solutions that engineers and stakeholders could both live with, it turned out my design background was an unexpected asset here. Being able to think visually and structurally helped me translate between teams in ways that moved things forward rather than stalling them.

If I could do one thing differently, I'd push earlier for clearer success metrics before launch. We had strong signals that the product was working, but defined measurement from the start would have made the story easier to tell, and the next iteration easier to prioritise.