Journey

Journey Platform UX Case Study

Reimagining Strategy Tools for Modern Leaders

March 2025

Journey started as a platform built by consultants for consultants. It was packed with features—but lacked clear direction, user empathy, and adoption. I joined at a critical moment, as the team realized they needed to define their audience, simplify the experience, and integrate AI meaningfully. My role was to lead product strategy and UX/UI to transform Journey into a smart, usable platform that leaders would actually want to use.

SERVICES

Product Strategy, UX Research, UI/UX Design, Vision Alignment

Project Overview

Objectives: Clarify the target audience, simplify the product, and reimagine Journey as an AI-powered assistant for executives and consultants making strategic decisions. Ensure the platform supports real-world use cases with less manual work.

❤️ Empathize

🔍 Define

✏️ Ideate & Test

🛠️ Refine

🎨 UI & Design

✨ Prototype

Journey’s platform had powerful potential but no clear user. Our goal was to reposition the product around one ideal customer profile (COOs/CEOs), simplify the bloated UX, and introduce helpful AI features. We transformed it from a consultant-built database into a usable strategy tool.

Approach

👥 Shifting Personas: From Consultants to Execs: When we pivoted from a consultant-only platform to targeting CEOs and COOs directly, we needed to deeply understand what actually matters to them. Unlike consultants, these users don’t want endless tools—they want clarity, speed, and outcomes. We created personas to reflect this shift: Olivia, the high-level CEO who needs instant takeaways, and Mark, the hands-on COO obsessed with execution. These profiles helped us align features with real needs, simplify the interface, and focus on what drives value for decision-makers.

🔍 Competitive Research

To better understand where Journey fits in the crowded productivity and strategy space, we conducted a feature-level comparison across three categories: AI notetakers, task and goal management tools, and organizational strategy platforms. While many tools excelled in one vertical—like transcription, action item detection, or KPI tracking—none offered an all-in-one solution. Journey stood out by combining real-time meeting intelligence, task management, strategy tracking, and predictive insights into a single platform. Most importantly, it’s the only tool we found actively designed to support consultants, CEOs, and COOs in one experience—bridging the gap between insight and execution.

🧠 AI Notetakers (e.g., Fireflies, tl;dv, TimeOS)

Strong at transcription, summarization, and action item detection
Lack deeper goal tracking or KPI visibility
Not built for executives or long-term strategic planning

✅ Goal-Setting & Task Management Tools (e.g., Asana, ClickUp, Lattice)

Great at managing tasks and team accountability
Not designed for meeting intelligence or strategy-level insights
Don’t solve for CEO/COO visibility across departments

📊 Strategy Tools for Organizations (e.g., Cascade, OnStrategy, AchieveIt)

Offer structured strategy tracking and planning tools
Often siloed from daily execution or real-time decision making
Not AI-powered and generally too rigid for fast-changing companies

🔧 Key Opportunity:

Journey is the only platform that blends real-time meeting intelligence, task and goal tracking, and executive-level visibility—while also supporting consultants who facilitate strategic change.

🧪 Research Plan + Interview Questions / Script

To guide our redesign, I created a focused research plan and conducted interviews with CEOs and COOs who were already working with Journey consultants. While these executives weren’t using the platform directly, their input was crucial—they were the ones receiving the strategic outputs. Our goal was to understand how they handle meetings, make decisions, and what role AI could play in helping them move faster. We also wanted to validate whether Journey could shift from being purely a consultant tool to something that executives would actually adopt themselves.

Key things we explored in interviews:

How they currently take notes, track action items, and stay aligned across teams
Their comfort level with AI-generated summaries and recommendations
Frustrations with manual follow-ups and miscommunication post-meetings
Expectations for clarity, speed, and high-level overviews
What would motivate them to use a platform like Journey themselves

The insights from these sessions directly shaped how we defined our core users, stripped down the platform, and prioritized AI-powered features executives would trust and actually use.

Important interview takeaways 🔁 AI needs to follow up, not just summarize CEOs and COOs wanted more than meeting notes—they expected the AI to help them follow through. That meant reminders for unresolved action items, recurring issue detection, and even nudges to escalate when things stall. 🧠 Even accurate AI still creates doubt Users expressed concern that AI might miss something important, which made them feel like they had to re-check everything. They wanted reassurance that nothing critical was overlooked—especially in high-stakes discussions. 🧩 Meeting history matters Executives didn’t want meetings treated as one-off events. They wanted the AI to understand context over time—surfacing repeated discussion points, previous decisions, and helping maintain strategic alignment across meetings.

🔍 Define

We started by mapping every single feature in the Journey platform. After years of development driven by consultant needs, the tool had become bloated with overlapping, underused, and overly complex functionality. This step helped us visualize what was truly essential—and what was just noise.

Audit of All Existing Features

✂️ Identifying Core Features to Keep

Using user feedback, usage analytics, and internal team input, we filtered out features based on three criteria:

Does it support executive decision-making?
Can AI automate it or simplify it?
Is it already being used (or could be easily adopted)?

This helped us define a smaller, high-impact core feature set that still delivered on Journey’s original value—AI-assisted strategic clarity—without overwhelming users.

🤝 Partnering for Real-World Testing

🤝 Partnering with Easter Seals
To validate our simplified user flow, we partnered with Easter Seals and built a tailor-made dashboard aligned with their real workflows and strategic goals.

🧩 What we created:

KPI Tracking Panel – Auto-pulled from their existing integrations, showing each KPI's current status, target, and progress
Strategic Plans – From 5-year roadmaps to quarterly goals, they could assign KPIs and initiatives to custom plans
Initiatives & Points of Discussion – One central space to capture goals, issues, random notes, and highlights all tied to strategic focus
Meeting List – Synced directly with recorded meetings, giving easy access to past discussions and summaries

🤖 Where AI Stepped In

We added AI assistance before, during, and after meetings to help cut manual work and boost strategic clarity.
Before the meeting:

Users added a basic agenda
AI generated a suggested discussion plan: what to cover, how long to spend on each item, and which metrics or issues to revisit

During the meeting:

Everything was recorded and transcribed
AI tagged agenda topics as they came up in conversation

After the meeting:

Smart Summary auto-generated a structured recap, including:
What was discussed + timestamps
Action items with smart tagging (e.g., “this should be low priority”)
Meeting updates (e.g., changed statuses, shifted priorities, notes linked to KPIs)

Here’s an example snippet from a real AI-generated summary: The Q2 marketing campaign was delayed due to vendor issues and internal team capacity. Gal shared NPS updates and proposed new lead generation strategies. Priority for the campaign was lowered post-discussion.This partnership let us test our new approach in the real world—and gave us clear insight into how CEOs and COOs actually wanted to use Journey.

✏️ Ideate & Test

💬 Real-Time Meeting Interface: During a live meeting, Journey acts as a facilitator. The left side shows the agenda with timers, while the right side pulls in dynamic content like live KPI updates and notes.

💡 Ideate & Prototype

With our core user flow in place and Easter Seals as a design partner, we jumped straight into high-fidelity prototyping. Since Journey already had a live product and a robust design system, we skipped wireframes and went straight to clickable designs so we could test real workflows, fast.

Here are the key screens I created — and why:

📊 KPI & Initiative Dashboard

This screen gives leaders a high-level snapshot of performance: current KPIs, target goals, progress trends, and connected initiatives.
Why we made it this way:

Executives want to see if they’re on track without digging into multiple tools.
KPIs are linked to initiatives, so users can immediately see what’s driving each number.
We integrated live metrics from tools like HubSpot and QuickBooks.

🧭 Strategy Overview Page (Spaces Dashboard)

This is the central page for each strategic plan (quarterly, yearly, or 5-year). It pulls together:

KPIs and progress
Initiatives driving those KPIs
Points of discussion like issues, notes, and highlights
A list of recorded meetings tied to the plan
Why:
Strategic plans need context. This page gives executives one hub for progress and discussions, not scattered across spreadsheets or email.
Designed for fast updates before or after meetings.

🎥 Meeting Summary Page

This screen shows a past recorded meeting, broken down with AI-generated notes and transcripts. It includes:

Video playback
Transcript
Meeting summary grouped by topic
Highlights, issues, decisions, and action items
Why:
Execs don’t want to rewatch a 90-minute meeting.
AI-generated summaries save time and increase alignment across teams.
We used time stamps and tags to help users jump to the most important parts.

📅 Agenda Builder (Pre-Meeting Flow)

Users can build a custom agenda before a meeting, broken into time slots. Each section can pull in real data (KPIs, issues, OKRs).
Why:

Meetings often go off the rails.
This tool keeps the team focused on strategy, not just random updates.
By tying agenda items to data, the platform becomes a planning assistant, not just a calendar.

💬 Real-Time Meeting Interface

During a live meeting, Journey acts as a facilitator. The left side shows the agenda with timers, while the right side pulls in dynamic content like live KPI updates and notes.
Why:

Time-boxing agenda items helps avoid long tangents.
Points of discussion (like issues and wins) are visible in real time and tied to strategic items.

🔎 Points of Discussion

A space to log issues, highlights, and random notes that come up throughout a plan. These can later be tagged, assigned, and tied to specific meetings or KPIs.
Why:

Strategy conversations happen outside structured planning.
We needed a place to capture ideas without losing context or turning everything into a formal task.

We rapidly prototyped high-fidelity, test-ready designs to turn Journey into a smart, strategic hub—connecting KPIs, meetings, and planning into one seamless workflow. This was right for Easterseals (our design partner), but was it right for other companies?

🛠️ Refine

Mid-Fidelity We kept the design intentionally simple and clean to focus on layout, structure, and flow—without getting distracted by branding or visual polish. The goal at this stage was to validate content hierarchy, user priorities, and key interactions with stakeholders before investing in high-fidelity visuals.

🔁 Test & Iterate: What Happened After Testing

We rolled out the prototype to our design partners at Easter Seals, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Their team loved the structure, the KPI-linked strategy view, and the AI-powered meeting summaries. They even requested a few new features — we were excited. It felt like we were onto something big.

But then... reality hit.

When the sales team tried pitching the new version to other clients, the enthusiasm just wasn’t there.

Turns out, Easter Seals’ way of working was pretty unique — highly structured, deeply strategic, and very KPI-driven. Most of our other clients didn’t operate like that.

💡 What We Learned From the Market

🗣️ CEOs prefer to go off-script. The structured meeting flow (with timed agenda items and KPI reviews) felt too rigid. Many execs wanted more flexibility to “just talk” and pivot mid-meeting.
✅ Task management was overkill. Our built-in task tracking clashed with tools clients already used, like Asana and Monday.com. Instead of replacing those, clients just wanted Journey to integrate with their existing stack.
🎯 Meetings needed less structure, more impact. The product felt like a “template factory,” which limited organic discussions and spontaneity — especially in high-level strategy meetings.

We realized: trying to be everything = not being useful to anyone.

So... we went back to the drawing board 🧠

This time, we:

Revisited our competitor research
Reconnected with our broader user base
Looked for ways to cut features, not add them
Focused on making Journey a powerful layer, not a replacement for existing tools

🧪 Testing Round 2: Analytics Dashboard for Strategic Insights

Before moving into our next iteration, we tested one more concept: an AI-powered OKR analytics screen.

We designed a dashboard that gave execs a bird’s-eye view of their company’s performance, using visual elements like graphs, risk alerts, and progress charts. Users could:

Track OKRs by team, owner, or time period
Spot risks (e.g. deadline delays, cost overruns)
View projections based on trends
Connect initiatives to outcomes via visual mapping

We thought this screen would be a powerful strategy command center. But...

💡 What we learned: While the dashboard offered valuable insights, many CEOs didn’t log in regularly enough to monitor trends themselves. They preferred actionable summaries sent to them automatically, or quick AI answers via chat.

🔮 Back to the Drawing Board — The Pivot

After realizing that the Easter Seals solution didn’t generalize well to other companies, we took a step back.

The feedback was clear:

The product was too structured and rigid.
Task management features were competing with tools teams already loved.
Every company has different workflows — and Journey needed to adapt, not replace.

So we reimagined Journey as something else: ✨ A personal assistant for CEOs and their teams. Not a new workspace — but a layer that makes meetings smarter, strategy clearer, and collaboration smoother.

🤖 The New Vision: A Smart Assistant, Not a Workspace

Instead of replacing workflows, Journey became a personal assistant that supports CEOs and their teams through AI:

🎥 Auto-Transcribes & Summarizes every meeting
🔍 Lets CEOs search past calls like “What did we decide last quarter?”
✅ Tracks action items and sends reminders via tools teams already use (Slack, Monday, etc.)
📣 Cascades decisions to the leadership team
🧠 Stores everything in a central “Brain” for future insights
📊 Sends weekly progress reports
👥 Keeps consultants & leadership aligned without needing constant check-ins

New User Flows

From the drawing board

And into figma

New Persona

Wireframes

🧠 “The Journey Companion” Dashboard

This screen is your daily command center.
It gathers real-time insights across your business—like product updates, customer risks, sales pipeline issues—and highlights them for quick action.
You can resolve items, add them as talking points for upcoming meetings, or delegate follow-ups.

🔍 Why?
Execs don’t want to dig through tools. This surfaces what matters most, ready to act.

📅 Meeting Prep Panel

Prepares you for your next meeting in seconds.
It pulls context from past meetings, open action items, and AI insights into one clean agenda.

🧠 Bonus: Journey AI shows recurring issues or key topics to address before the meeting even starts.

🎯 Why?
Busy execs don’t prep. This does it for them—fast, smart, focused.

Mid-Fidelity

We kept the design intentionally simple and clean to focus on layout, structure, and flow—without getting distracted by branding or visual polish. The goal at this stage was to validate content hierarchy, user priorities, and key interactions with stakeholders before investing in high-fidelity visuals.

After testing with design partners, we realized our structured solution didn’t generalize well—CEOs needed flexibility, not rigid templates or overlapping task tools. This led to a major pivot: Journey evolved into a smart assistant layer that supports leadership through AI-powered insights, meeting prep, and seamless integration with existing workflows.

🎨 UI & Design

The Journey design system — built for clarity, consistency, and speed. Designed to scale with the product while staying flexible for rapid iteration.

💻 High-Fidelity Prototype: “Next Gen Platform” Enters Development

After testing multiple directions, we decided to build what we called the “Next Gen Platform” — a radically simplified, focused version of Journey that zeroed in on just three core flows:

CEO & JP meetings
CEO & C-Level team execution
C-Level to Team alignment

We designed a high-fidelity prototype with production-level visuals and functionality, which quickly moved into development. The UI was intentionally minimal, clean, and calm — removing all distractions and surfacing only what the user needs in the moment.

Some key highlights:

Home screen: Shows the time, your goals, your tasks, and your next meeting — that’s it. One click to prepare.
Behind-the-scenes intelligence: Journey listens in on meetings, generates summaries and action items, and cascades information automatically.
Flow visualization: We clearly mapped how the platform supports each level of leadership, with an AI assistant quietly orchestrating everything in the background.

This version marked a shift from being a platform you go into, to an assistant that comes to you.

🧠 Final Product: Journey AI – Simplified, Strategic, Smart

After multiple iterations, user tests, and real-world feedback, we launched the new high-fidelity version of Journey—focused, actionable, and ready to scale.

We stripped away the complexity and rebuilt the platform around three key user flows:

Goal setting
Meeting prep
Task delegation + follow-up

Everything else—notes, agendas, dashboards—now happens automatically in the background via AI agents.

New home screen with suggestions

✨ What’s Different?

Personalized Homepage
Users land on a clean, goal-focused view showing just what matters: goals, tasks, and their next meeting.
AI Suggestions
Smart agents now proactively surface things like:
- Emails you forgot to answer
- Tasks buried in transcripts
- Summaries that need to be archived in your CRM
  Each comes with 1-click options: ✅ Yes, I'll do it / ❌ Dismiss / 🔁 Snooze
Agent Ecosystem
Users are now guided by AI agents and onboarded by JPs (Journey Partners). Agents include:
- Smart Template Agent
- Reply Agent
- Meeting Prep Agent
  ...with more on the way (Goal Agent, Context Agent, etc.)
CRM & Tool Integrations
Seamless flow between Journey, Slack, Hubspot, Google Calendar, Zoom, and your task managers.

Meeting Screen

🚀 Why It Works

By shifting the experience from a static tool into a proactive AI assistant, we solved the main pain points:

CEOs no longer have to search, prep, or remind people—Journey does it for them.
Leadership teams stay aligned through subtle nudges, not forced templates.
Consultants (JPs) can see client progress at a glance, without chasing updates.

The result?
A strategic operating system that actually fits into how exec teams work.
And yes—it’s already in production. 😎

AI Agents

Agent settings

'Ask me anything' modal

Goals

Chrome Extension

We transformed Journey into a proactive, AI-powered assistant—streamlining leadership workflows into a sleek, production-ready platform focused on clarity, action, and real impact.

✨ Prototype

The final prototype of Journey reimagines the platform as a proactive AI assistant for executive teams—helping them set goals, prep for meetings, and follow up effortlessly. The experience is centered around clarity, action, and minimal friction.

Built for executive teams, Journey acts as a strategic assistant—helping leaders stay aligned, make faster decisions, and keep momentum across meetings, goals, and tasks. We're launching the new version in the following weeks...