KodiakHR·Led design for a hiring tool that gave teams a complete and fair view of a candidate's soft skills through automated reference checks. Over a year of sprints, I worked with the two founders to design every part of it.

The first piece of work was the reference report — the artefact hiring managers actually read. It needed to feel rigorous enough to anchor a hiring decision, and legible enough to scan in a minute. Then came the rest of the applicant tracking system: the multi-step request flow, candidate dashboards, search, the survey builder, transactional emails, and the marketing site. Each surface had a different audience: recruiters, hiring managers, candidates, references. They all needed to feel like parts of one product.

I built a design system in Figma early on, with components, tokens, and patterns the engineers could pull from directly. A year in, the team kicked off a second product, unrelated to reference checks. The same library carried it from wireframes to finished UI in a three-week sprint — a good test of the foundations.

We learned a lot from working with Robin, and those lessons directly impacted the success of our second startup. To this day, I frequently ask myself when designing a new feature — what would Robin say?