Case Study — Product Design · Mobile & Web
How I stepped into a leaderless product mid-build, corrected the course, and delivered a live QR platform with a mobile app, web companion, and design system — in four months.
Company
My role
Deliverables
Timeline
🔥 Outcome
Shipped and live. Joined mid-project with no clear direction, established design leadership, introduced a no-signup first flow, and delivered a product that's now in production.
01 — Context
Tggy is a dynamic QR code platform aimed at marketing professionals. The premise is simple and well-executed: create a QR code quickly, update where it points without reprinting, and track scan performance — all from one clean dashboard.
What set Tggy apart from the crowded field of QR generators was a deliberate focus on speed and clarity. No bloated feature sets. No forced account creation just to get a code. And crucially — both a mobile app and a web companion, so the tool worked wherever the marketer happened to be.
When I joined, the product existed in concept and partial build. The problem wasn't the idea. It was everything that had happened in the process of trying to execute it.
02 — The Situation I Walked Into
The team had been working on Tggy before I arrived. The CTO had been leading design decisions — a technically brilliant person operating outside their expertise. The result was a product that had consumed significant time but had no coherent roadmap, inconsistent quality across screens, and no design system to hold any of it together.
The business was feeling this more than anyone. Time had passed and there was little to show for it — nothing ready to put in front of users, nothing ready for developers to confidently build from.
"The CTO had been leading design decisions. The result was significant time spent, inconsistent quality, and no roadmap to speak of."
Before I joined
Design led by engineering
No dedicated design leadership meant the product was being shaped by technical instincts — functional but visually inconsistent, hard to learn, and lacking a coherent user journey.
No roadmap, no design system
The team had no shared reference for decisions. Every screen was being made in isolation. Nothing was aligned, and there was no foundation to build on without reworking it.
After I joined
Clear ownership and direction
I established design leadership immediately — auditing what existed, defining what was worth keeping, and creating a roadmap that the team could actually execute against.
A design system to build on
One of the first deliverables I pushed for was a design system — shared components, consistent patterns, a single source of truth that prevented the fragmentation from recurring.
03 — The User Problem
Marketing professionals generating QR codes aren't running a technical workflow. They're moving fast between campaigns, events, and assets. What they needed was a tool that could keep up.
What they had instead were tools that required sign-up before generating a single code, that had no mobile companion for on-the-go management, and that buried the most common action — create a code — under layers of onboarding and feature tours.
The friction
Existing tools gate the core action behind account creation. If you just need a QR code right now — you can't have one until you've signed up, verified, and onboarded.
The gap
No existing tool offered both a mobile app and a web companion. Marketers managing campaigns across locations had no clean way to create and manage codes on the go.
The opportunity
A tool that gets out of the way — letting users create instantly as guests, then earn their trust enough for sign-up once they've already seen the value.
04 — Key Design Decision
The existing assumption — inherited from competitors and from the team's prior work — was that users should sign up before generating a QR code. It was the default. It felt safe. It was wrong.
I pushed for a different model: let users generate a QR code immediately, as a guest, with a single click. Put the value first, the account creation second. Sign-up becomes a natural next step when someone has already experienced what Tggy does — not a gate they have to get through before they're allowed to find out.
The question
Should users be required to create an account before generating their first QR code?
Existing assumption
Sign up first, then generate
Standard SaaS onboarding model. Prioritises account creation and data capture. Asks for trust before demonstrating value — and loses users before they've seen anything worth staying for.
✓ My recommendation
Generate first, sign up later
One-click guest generation upfront — on both mobile and web. The product earns the user's trust by being immediately useful. Sign-up is prompted mid-session, after they've already invested in the tool.
This decision shaped the entire onboarding architecture. It also influenced the information hierarchy of the home screen — the primary action had to be visible and accessible without any account state, which in turn drove how the guest and signed-in experiences were differentiated throughout the app.
05 — The Output
Over the course of the project, we designed the full product — not a partial redesign. Every flow an employee or admin would encounter was considered, structured, and visually resolved.
Mobile app
7 flows
51 screens total
Web companion
Dashboard & management
11 screens total
Supporting deliverables
System & surface
Foundation for the full product
06 — Outcome
Tggy is in production. The developers moved from the designs to build, the product shipped, and users are generating QR codes today. For a project that arrived without direction and without a functioning design process, getting to a live, coherent product in four months is the outcome that matters most.
The design system — one of the first things I introduced — meant the development team had a stable, shared reference throughout the build. It reduced back-and-forth, prevented inconsistencies from resurfacing, and gave the product a visual coherence that the earlier work hadn't achieved.
07 — Reflection
Tggy is a case study in a specific kind of design work that rarely gets named: mid-project rescue. Coming into an existing team, quickly assessing what's worth keeping and what needs to change, earning the trust of people who've been working on something for months without you — and then actually delivering.
The hardest part wasn't the design decisions. It was the human ones. Getting a CTO to step back from design decisions they'd been making for months. Getting a team to adopt a design system mid-project. Getting everyone aligned on a roadmap when there hadn't been one before.
These are skills that don't show up in a Figma file. But they're often what determines whether a product ships or stalls.