Tribe

Tribe is a community platform helping organisers run memberships, events and payments in one place. As Product Lead, I shaped the strategy, UX and UI from the ground up, turning a tangle of workflows into a product organisers actually enjoy using, and members keep coming back to.

Tribe high fidelity product screen 1
Overview
The Process
My Role
Discover
Define
Plan
Design
Test

Overview

Tribe is a community platform that enables organisers to create, manage, and grow their communities through events, memberships, and engagement tools. As Product Lead and sole UX/UI designer, I owned the end-to-end product experience from defining strategy and user flows to designing and delivering the interface. I led key areas on both B2C & B2B including onboarding, event creation, memberships, and community management, focusing on simplifying complex workflows like ticketing and payments. My work established a clear, consistent, and scalable product foundation, enabling organisers to confidently run and grow their communities through a more intuitive, self-serve experience.

The Process

1.Discover

2.Ideate

3.Plan

4.Design

5.Test

Stakeholder interviews

Community Lead interviews

Competitor analysis

IA & Sitemap

User archetypes

Concept exploration

Roadmap planning

Sprint planning & Backlog refinement

Feature deep dives

Design system

High fidelity designs

PDRs

Prototyping

User testing

Design Iterations

QA & deployment testing

My Role

Tribe project management board with sprint tasks and roadmap

Management & Strategy

As Product Lead at Tribe, I held dual ownership of both product direction and design, leading a cross-functional team while personally delivering all UX and UI across the product.

On the product side, I ran the team day-to-day: facilitating standups, structuring our ways of working in ClickUp, managing sprint planning, and keeping stakeholders aligned.

Design & Execution

On the design side, I was the sole designer, responsible for everything from early concept and user research through to final UI, design system, and iterative improvements based on ongoing user testing with real community members.

Crucially, I built the product from the ground up. There was no existing foundation to work from, the design language, component library, processes, and product decisions were all established from scratch over the past year. This dual role meant balancing strategic thinking with hands-on execution every day, in a live startup environment where priorities shifted and real users informed every iteration.

Tribe membership, dashboard and email broadcast design screens

Discover

Stakeholder interviews

Stakeholder interviews

With no existing product to build on, the starting point was the people closest to the community. Interviews with founders, community managers, and the CTO shaped product direction from day one, surfacing priorities, tensions between business and community needs, and a shared language for what we were building.
Community Lead interviews

Community Lead interviews

Community leads were Tribe's power users, deeply embedded in the product and vocal about what wasn't working. Interviewing them directly gave a ground-level view that stakeholder conversations couldn't provide, helping ensure the product was being built for real people, not just business goals.
Competitor analysis

Competitor analysis

Mapping the landscape of community and event platforms helped identify where Tribe could carve out its own space, what was working, what was tired, and where there was room to do something genuinely better.

Define

Tribe sitemap showing public archetypes site and authenticated dashboard structure

IA & Sitemap

With insights gathered, I mapped out the product's information architecture, defining the structure, hierarchy, and core flows that would underpin every feature decision moving forward.
Grid of user archetype cards with illustrations, motivations and category tags

User archetypes

Rather than rigid personas, I built lightweight archetypes capturing the key motivations, behaviours, and goals of organisers and members, a shared reference the team could design and build against.

Plan

Roadmap planning

Roadmap planning

Translating strategy into a phased roadmap that balanced quick wins with foundational work, keeping the team focused and stakeholders aligned on what mattered most.
Sprint planning & backlog

Sprint planning & backlog

Running sprint planning and backlog refinement in ClickUp, breaking features down into shippable increments and ensuring the team always had a clear next step.
Feature deep dives

Feature deep dives

For complex features, I led detailed deep-dive sessions to align engineering, design and product on behaviour, edge cases and success criteria before any work began.

Design

Tribe concept exploration screen 1
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Concept Exploration

With the structure defined, the next step was exploring how it could come to life visually. Rather than jumping straight into high fidelity, concept exploration was about trying different directions, testing how the product could look and feel before committing to a single approach.

For Tribe, this meant exploring how a community platform could feel distinct from the social apps people already used every day. The goal wasn't to reinvent the wheel but to find a visual and interaction language that felt native to the type of communities Tribe was built for, engaged, interest-led, and human.

Given the pace of the startup, these explorations were focused and intentional rather than exhaustive. Each direction was evaluated quickly against what we knew about our users and the product vision, allowing decisions to be made fast without sacrificing the quality of the final output.

Tribe design system, colour palette, gradients and CTA component states

Design System

Once the design concept was chosen, I built the foundation from scratch , defining colour, typography, spacing, and iconography before building out a full component library. Every element was created once, documented, and reused consistently across the product.

Maintaining and evolving the system was an ongoing responsibility throughout the year. As new features were designed and the product grew, components were refined, new patterns introduced, and the system adapted to meet new challenges , ensuring Tribe stayed visually consistent no matter how fast we were moving.

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High Fidelity Designs

With the design system in place, I moved straight to high fidelity, skipping wireframes in favour of designing at pace directly in the final visual language. In a startup environment where time was limited and the design system provided enough structural foundation, this was a conscious decision that kept momentum without sacrificing quality. Designs were never considered final, they evolved continuously based on feedback from testing and real-world usage, with iterations made quickly and fed back into the system.
PDR document for Membership and Refund & Cancellations features

PDR’s & Functional Specs

Before anything went to development, I produced a PDR for each feature, a functional specification that translated design decisions into clear, actionable detail for the developers and QA team. Each PDR outlined how a feature should behave, covering interactions, edge cases, and anything that couldn't be communicated through the designs alone. Once in build, the QA team worked against the PDR to verify the feature behaved as specified before deployment, keeping hand-off clean and reducing misinterpretations.

Test

Prototyping

Prototyping

Before any feature reached the development team, it was prototyped, bringing the high fidelity designs to life to validate interactions and user flows before a line of code was written. Prototypes were built in Figma and used directly in user testing sessions with community leads, giving a realistic enough experience to surface real feedback.

This step was what turned static designs into something the team could rally around and stakeholders could actually respond to.

User testing

User testing

With a prototype ready, I tested each feature with community leads over Google Meet, observing how they navigated the journey, where they hesitated, and what didn't work as expected. Recruiting from within the community meant feedback came from real, invested users rather than generic testers.

Every session fed directly back into the design before release, iterated on until the experience was right before it ever reached the wider community.

Conclusion

Leading Tribe as both Product Lead and sole designer in a live startup environment demanded a level of ownership that shaped how I think about product and design. Managing a team, driving the roadmap, running sprints, and delivering all the UX and UI simultaneously meant operating across every layer of the product, from high-level strategy to the finest interaction detail.

Working in a startup with no fixed process, shifting priorities, and real users from day one forced a different way of thinking. Decisions had to be made quickly, validated with the community, and iterated on without losing sight of the bigger picture. That balance of speed and rigour, knowing when to move fast and when to slow down, is something you can only learn by doing.

The result is a platform that is live, growing, and continuing to evolve. A year of building in a fast-moving, resource-constrained environment has been the most formative experience of my career so far.

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