Hootsuite

Designing a North Star to align a fragmented platform

Brought together 15 product areas and executive stakeholders around a shared direction for scalable, trustworthy AI

Role

Senior Staff Product Designer

Scope

Portfolio-level strategy & experience direction

Timeframe

Four months

Org reach

15 product teams; executive alignment

Impact summary

Established a shared product vision adopted across teams

Influenced prioritization and roadmap sequencing

Established a shared product vision adopted across teams

Influenced prioritization and roadmap sequencing

“You excel at making sense of ambiguity and shaping direction. Your ability to connect ideas elevates strategic decision-making.”

–Julian Richards, Senior Director, Product Design & UX

The problem & context

Hootsuite is an social marketing platform serving 22 million global marketing professionals. Rapid expansion and new AI investments had amplified fragmentation across the product, creating friction for users and limiting the company’s ability to introduce AI in a cohesive, trustworthy way.

Users described disjointed & fragmented UX

Product teams were not collaborating

New AI features were amplifying the disconnect

User needs

Through user research, our core user described Hootsuite as “powerful but disjointed." I needed to deliver a seamless, intelligent workflow that worked as one system, not a collection of tools & acquisitions.

Business goal

I was brought in to create clarity on where the experience should evolve next, so the organization could unlock meaningful innovation and introduce AI responsibly across the product teams.

North Star vision prototype

Approach

My strategy was to reduce ambiguity early by defining a shared experience architecture and framework that could scale across teams and support AI responsibly. To accomplish this, I…

Defined experience principles as AI guardrails

Clarified where AI should and shouldn't show up by prototyping the experience

Aligned the ecosystem & teams around intent, not features

Enabled Design Systems and AI teams to build consistently

Scaled design influence beyond my direct ownership

Design operating at the right altitude to drive change

Strategic moment: Scalable AI components

The risk

15 product areas approached AI differently, creating a fragmented user experience.

The controversy

The business needed to ship fast, to maintain a strong AI-first position in the market.

What changed after

I delivered components & guardrails that shipped a human-friendly AI experience, at peak velocity.

AI infused into core experiences

Before

After

Impact

This work shaped the 2026 multi-quarter roadmap, which was adopted across portfolios. Cross-portfolio communication significantly improved; and Design's role in executive decision-making and long term planning was clearly established.

Major AI priorities unlocked for the 2026 roadmap

1st

AI-ready experience architecture introduced

+/-

Reduced friction across Design, Dev, Product & Design Systems teams

Closing insight

Designing for AI at scale isn’t about shipping models. It’s about creating clarity, guardrails, and shared direction so intelligence compounds over time, while building end user trust.

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