Connect Link Overview

Early stage startup with a global and fully remote team
Connect Link's mission was to create a space where founders, especially founders from non-traditional education backgrounds, could get access to people and resources to build their startups, and make better decisions.
Connect Link wants to combine learning, connecting, and educating within one space.

Joining the Team

I joined Connect Link with previous experience at my time at Gameplanner.ai, which had recently been acquired by Airbnb. My time there had been my singular formal work experience of my life, and would inform a lot of the work I did for Connect Link
At Connect Link, I quickly realized that the organization and communication was at a drastically lower level than I was used to.
Feeling disorganized to the point where it affected my ability to build, I implemented a scheduling and project management system that quickly was adopted by the entire design team, and then company wide.
I served as the primary point of contact between design and content/marketing, straddling both roles and ensuring progress was being made in both areas.

Began research process with competitive product and market analysis as our team tried to get an understanding of the space and what users would look at with familiarity.

We conducted some qualitative and quantitative research among both founders, and mentors, our initial two user groups.
What was results of interviews?

After gathering a large amount of external information from competitive products, and the needs of our target user groups, we created some personas and affinity maps to help guide our design explorations.
We created user personas based off the people we met--keeping edge cases at hand. We also created a singular persona that was a median of all our interviews: perhaps profiling an average user.

As design lead, I worked on all parts of the design process.
Created various user-flows, from wireframe to mid-fi design.
I created initial screens for various parts of our app design, which we expected to be built with a React framework.

We did not have a dedicated graphic designer in our initial stages, so I interfaced with the content and marketing team to build some initial materials to allow them to start creating a digital presence.
My main (and lasting) work was to create guidelines and standards for our posts, type, and various other components in order to standardize our message through employee turnover.

I stopped working at ConnectLink in February 2024, as my focus shifted to other projects.
When joining Connect Link, I took a step up in terms of responsibility and leadership compared to my time at Gameplanner.ai.
I hadn't realized how well lead, and how well organized my previous workplace was, which made me even more thankful for my time and experience there.
Due to it, I was able to provide leadership, management, and communication in my work with Connect Link. Instead of being presented a well thought out and focused plan, I needed to create my own. Balancing the ability to do that with my own individual contributions has been an incredible learning experience.