Product Institute
2019-2022
Role: Director of Product Design
Product Institute is a growing online learning hub and community for product managers. The subscription hosts a collection of ever-growing curriculum that students can follow at their own pace, mixed with activities, downloadable materials and access to remote workshops and coaching to help guide product leaders throughout their career.
I was brought on to Product Institute as Director of Design to help design, produce and streamline the processes used to create their courses, as well as implement branding and design practices across all facets of the product: video, downloadable .pdfs, as well as our web and marketing presence.
Product Institute Videos
The largest project at Product Institute is producing the 10-15 video lessons that are the bread and butter of the school’s courses. From script writing, to storyboarding, to video production and animation, this is a massive lift that involves various members of the team, as well as the course designers who collaborate with us. Together with the product team, I worked to streamline the video process as it moves through each person. During my time at Product Institute we’ve leveled up the videos tenfold: we’re using better, more dynamic animation software to help us create more professional-looking videos, and have created templates within that software to expedite video production, all while keeping things on-brand.
Old Product Institute Video Styling vs. New:
Old Product Institute Worksheets vs. New:
Design System & Templates for Downloadable Materials
Alongside streamlining our video process, I also redesigned the worksheets to simplifying and match the rebranding of the site: with the worksheet redesign we focused on simplifying and creating space for students to work and digest information, as well as easily print in black and white to work on or use as a reference.
I created a set of templates to achieve a similar level of efficiency with downloadable worksheets: this not only allowed us to produce them much more quickly, but gave us a system of worksheets to hand off to our course-creators, so they could easily plug in ideas to pre-determined worksheet styles and formats.
With the video and worksheets process improved, I also worked together with our VP of Product to write up process documentation for Product Institute: instructing the team on our overall process for releasing a Product Institute Course. This details everything from working with course designers to develop a course, style guides and best practices for videos and worksheets, to pushing the release out the door on Teachable. With these process improvements, we were able to reduce the amount of time it took to produce courses from more than half a year to just a matter of months. With a more efficient process, it also made it easier for us to work on a number of courses simultaneously.
UI/UX Improvements on Product Institute
Product Institute runs largely on Teachable, which sometimes makes for troubling interactions for our users between our website and the school itself. Outside of working with course design and process, I worked on a number of UX improvements and user flows across the site, particularly around the complex amount of plans and add-ons within our checkout flow. The product team and I worked together remotely via a number of collaborative tools to improve various experiences on the site for our users.
