Lit Protocol

I was initially hired at Lit Protocol as a contractor to bring the Lockable Interactive Token minter and gallery to production.

Due to feedback the two founders were receiving, our focus quickly shifted to a full app store featuring implementations of the Lit Protocol. I was hired full time as the Founding Product Designer.

To change the first ideas from our CEO into a longer-term product vision, I broke the growing number of implementation ideas we had into two groups: apps and offers. Our file sharing and minter implementations became apps.

Most valuably, I brought the token-gating flow out into a separate modal that could be applied both across our apps/offers and used by developers as a ready-made component in their use cases. The V2 was recently released with Boolean logic (a market differentiator).

To build a foundation for the design team, I created a design language and branding package.

My daily workload included writing goals and user stories, creating user flows and low and high fidelity mockups, working with engineers to identify technical constraints, prioritizing features, and writing tickets.

To build a foundation for the product team, I established a delivery workflow with our front-end contractor. We already had data coming in to FullStory and Google Analytics, so I added metrics, created dashboards, and provided reports to the company.

For community building, I created and organized our Discord channels and added permissions, human verification and spam blocking. I added a mailing list sign-up on the Lit Gateway and managed our mailing list and email campaigns. I created support and contact forms in Airtable.

Lit Protocol was gaining traction and we needed to look like a brand people could trust and invest in.

I redesigned our marketing website with a focus on mobile first. To help visitors intuit how Lit Protocol worked at a technical level, I created visuals to illustrate the engineering behind the protocol. These were helpful in our slide decks for investors and our marketing website for use cases. I also worked with our front-end developer to change design libraries across the website and apps.

Our growing user base was giving us valuable feedback in our Discord server and I began scheduling interviews with users. These interviews helped our company refine our focus on developer adoption at hackathons and our documentation.

As part of an additional push for community growth, I designed a futuristic NFT with 4 asset classes and over 400k possible permutations as well as a rarity table. Our genesis NFT was minted in full with 10,000 NFTs minted to individual users. The NFT included a token-gated canvas that only our genesis NFT owners could draw on.

To prepare for a strong showing as an ETHDenver Meta sponsor, I designed t-shirts, stickers and matchbooks to give to conference attendees. As always, it was a great week at the sports castle.

We took advantage of all physically being in the same location for ETHDenver to host our first product planning meeting. I facilitated planning by gathering a list of our next possible work as a company, determining how much discovery was needed on each item, prioritizing work that was ready to begin production, and delegating both production ready action items and discovery action items.

Other odds-and-ends that I helped with include structuring our pitch deck and managing Discord moderators.

ETHDenver had been a great success. Teams were making waves using our tech, we were seeing consistent traffic on the marketing site driven by the conference, and enthusiastic developers were touting the unique value of Lit Protocol on Discord and Twitter. Interviews with ETHDenver hackers who had used Lit Protocol continued to highlight improvements for our messaging, SEO, developer docs, etc. Our MVP was finding market fit, so we moved to raising the bar for our product.

I designed an updated version of the access control modal to support new Boolean conditions (allowing for complex logic) and editable conditions. A common ask had been a dark mode of the modal, so I began updating our design system for this as well. The Shopify application was released with this new modal.

In addition to a new modal, the marketing site was ready for expansion to display additional use cases. I started on a fuller website than just a landing page, with an overview of where Lit Protocol was directed. Breakpoints were improved, grid systems were solidified, the menu and structure adjusted. The new use case pages emphasized technical illustrations.