Find the thing that should stay true.
Ren was a focused 90-day engagement with a founder and team navigating a familiar early-stage tension: the product could do a great deal, but its center of gravity was harder to see. The work was to clarify that center and carry it into the experience.
Context was the product problem.
The feedback could be useful, but it did not always know enough about the person, their role, or the arc of the relationship to feel consistent. I worked with the founder and team to define a clearer True North, then helped translate it into onboarding, profile, manager, and shared-context experiences across the product.
Clarify the center. Rebuild outward from it.
Define the True North
Create a shared product frame that made tradeoffs easier for the founder and team, especially when a promising feature pulled attention away from the core experience.
Give the product better context
Ship an onboarding profile that captured role, reporting lines, responsibilities, and preferences so the experience could begin with a more useful understanding of the person.
Connect the experience
Work with Ren’s AI engineer on a shared product brain for greater consistency across web and Slack, while handing forward the next layer of story, company context, and workplace integration.
“A rare mix of product judgment, operating clarity, AI fluency, and hands-on execution.”Jonathan Raymond
Founder & CEO
“His design skills and eye for simple and robust process have been extremely helpful.”Dane Groeneveld
CEO & Founder
the decision
A thinking tool for a team moving quickly.
Choose a feature idea. Anchor brings it back to the product’s True North before momentum makes the decision for the team.
Role-aware onboarding gives the coaching experience the context it needs.
When making gets easier, deciding what deserves to exist becomes more important.
Ren made that tension visible. AI increased the team’s ability to explore and ship. The more valuable work was keeping the product coherent while the space of possible things expanded.
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