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Jatango from Alpha to Beta
My year leading design at an early-stage startup
February 2024 - 2025
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My Time at Jatango
Since the start of 2024, I've worked as UX Design Lead at Jatango, where I've driven the design strategy for an early-stage tech startup building a live-streaming marketplace that combines social commerce with multi-platform live selling. Essentially, if you combined Etsy with TikTok and focused on selling via live streams, you'd have Jatango.
This role challenged me to wear multiple hats, but in my first year leading design at Jatango, I...
- Established a complete design system
- Designed 12+ features from concept to implementation
- And took on dual leadership roles over our cross-functional team to drive our beta launch.
Working in a startup environment, I developed strong skills in translating executive vision into actionable design solutions. I created efficient workflows that accommodated leadership's preference for high-fidelity prototypes, becoming adept at rapid iteration and interactive demonstrations that facilitated clear decision-making.
In what follows, instead of reviewing a specific design I worked on, I wanted to reflect on my journey over the past year and share what I've learned, what I've accomplished, and how I've grown.
Jatango's home page where you can browse lives, sellers, and products
Background
These are most of the primary screens from the alpha when I first joined
When I joined Jatango in early 2024, the company's product was between the Alpha and MVP stages with basic functionality that included user registration, store creation, product uploads, and checkout. However, live streaming capabilities were still external (via Facebook Live with product links).
A single developer built the technical foundation over a two-year period before departing. I joined the company as it scaled to a full development team of 5 engineers, along with project management and executive leadership.
My role involved establishing design operations from the ground up while collaborating closely with leadership to translate business vision into user-centered experiences that could scale with our growing platform.
Setting the Foundation
The Challenge
Establish consistent design standards across a product built without formal design oversight while supporting rapid feature development.
Building Scalable Design Systems
In my first two months, I created Jatango's first comprehensive design system, establishing visual consistency and interaction patterns that became the foundation for all future development. This system enabled our development team to build a component library that accelerated feature delivery by an estimated 25%.
This role challenged me to wear multiple hats, but in my first year leading design at Jatango, I...
- Complete UI component library with interaction states
- Brand guidelines and visual language
- Accessibility standards and inclusive design principles
- Documentation and usage guidelines for developers
A high level view of all the elements in Jatango's design system
Definitely not the smoothest feature, order management was the design I cut my teeth on and I fined tuned my process over several iterations
Rapid Feature Development
With the foundation in place, I designed and delivered over 12 major features within the following 10 months, including complex flows such as order management, seller onboarding, and live stream selling. Each feature went through iterative refinement while maintaining system consistency.
Key Successes
I excelled at handling ambiguous requirements by defining problems and creating solutions with minimal initial specifications. And I developed a rapid prototyping workflow that reduced the time from design to development handoff and ensured stakeholder alignment before implementation began.
The design that never was: a chat-based, live show scheduling UI that allowed strangers to easily coordinate a schedule a live show together all in app
Scaling Design Operations
The Challenge
Evolve my design processes to accommodate the growing complexity of the team and an ambitious product roadmap, while maintaining high-quality standards.
Cross-Functional Leadership
I established collaborative frameworks between design, development, and leadership that improved project velocity and reduced rework. This framework included creating detailed handoff documentation, annotation systems, and regular cross-team alignment sessions.
A flow diagram for our registration that benefitted my design as well as my effort to communicate the design to the development team
Innovation in Practice:
I developed role-playing exercises for stakeholder meetings that helped leadership understand user perspectives and make more informed product decisions. This approach significantly reduced late-stage design changes and improved the speed of decision-making.
This is Jane, our defacto Persona, who makes a frequent appearance throughout the prototypes along with her store, Jane's Boutique
Communication Excellence
Working with a visually oriented leadership team, I optimized my communication approach by quickly transitioning design ideas into high-fidelity interactive prototypes, rather than traditional wireframes. This adaptation improved stakeholder engagement and reduced feedback cycles by around one to two weeks in some cases.
I maintained clear documentation and annotation practices that helped developers understand complex interaction patterns, edge cases, and conditional states, thereby preventing implementation gaps and reducing QA cycles.
These are some examples of some of the annotations I made on designs prior to developer handoff
Leading Through Complexity
The Challenge
Maintain design quality and team momentum when project management gaps threatened product timelines and beta launch goals.
Dual-Role Leadership
When our project manager departed mid-project, I seamlessly transitioned into managing both design and project delivery responsibilities. This dual role allowed me to maintain design quality while ensuring our team met technical milestones and continued to progress product development.
Strategic Impact
I implemented an iterative design-to-development approach by creating comprehensive feature designs, then collaborated with leadership to phase implementation based on user priorities. This approach helped prevent scope creep and provided the team with a holistic perspective on our long-term vision, while ensuring that our team could tackle a new feature in manageable chunks in order to ship essential functionality on time.
Phase 1 and 2 of our Live Show UI from the perspective of a show host, with additional functionality already designed for future phases of the implementation
I wrote so many user stories in the past year that it felt like my brain was rewiring to think in a given-when-then format!
Process Innovation
I established user story frameworks and acceptance criteria documentation that improved development clarity and reduced implementation errors. My approach included a multimodal handoff:
- Annotated Figma files that broke down features into phased implementation plans
- Detailed feature requirements that balanced user needs with business goals, giving developers a clear feature outline
- Proactive communication systems that kept developers on target and aligned with business goals
Measurable Outcome
This systematic approach enabled our team to consistently meet sprint goals in the final four months leading up to our beta launch, compared to the frequent missed deadlines in the earlier phases of the project.
Delivering Impact
The Challenge
Successfully launch a beta product that demonstrated design maturity and user-centered thinking to support the next funding phase.
Beta Launch Success
Through systematic design operations and cross-functional leadership, our team successfully launched Jatango's beta on schedule. The product showcased:
- A cohesive user experience across 12+ major feature areas
- Consistent brand expression through a comprehensive design system used throughout the product
- And scalable technical implementation ready for user growth
This is about 80% of the entire UI for Jatango, excluding flows such as Order Management and Registration, and leaving out different states for a lot of the screens, because, yes, this file was incredibly laggy given how much I packed in here!
Design Leadership Growth
Over 12 months, I evolved from an individual contributor to a design leader capable of:
- Strategic Planning: Translating business vision into actionable design roadmaps
- Team Development: Mentoring developers on design implementation and UX thinking
- Executive Communication: Facilitating productive design discussions with C-suite stakeholders
- Project Leadership: Managing complex timelines and competing priorities across multiple workstreams
Transferable Value Creation
This role helped me develop competencies directly applicable to scaling design organizations:
- Proven ability to establish design operations from ground zero
- Experience managing stakeholder relationships across all organizational levels
- Track record of successful dual-role leadership in resource-constrained environments
- Expertise in rapid prototyping and iterative design methodologies
Bottom Line
I helped transform a startup with no formal design processes into an organization with mature design operations, systematic workflows, and a user-centered product ready for market expansion.
Key Learnings & Future Applications
This experience reinforced my passion for creating a high-quality and cohesive user experience by relying on solid processes and established design foundations, which enable my teams to move quickly without sacrificing UX quality. I'm energized by the opportunity to apply these skills in environments where design leadership can drive both user satisfaction and business growth.
The challenges I navigated at Jatango—from establishing design systems to managing complex stakeholder relationships—have prepared me to take on senior design roles where I can mentor other designers while continuing to drive strategic product decisions.