Product designer for B2B software, from first sketch to shipped code. Seven years in product. Four of them leading design at Expandi, used by 20,000+ businesses.
See the workWork
09 companies, 2019 – now
- 06Aimoove
- 07Acklen Avenue
- 08KioStore
- 09Fiverr Pro
How I work
Most of what lands on my desk is a request. The job is finding the decision hiding inside it.
- 01
I find the number before I open Figma
Onboarding's brief was "fewer steps". The number that mattered was 41% of sign-ups lost at the card step, the most expensive drop in the business. That turned a friction brief into a trust brief, and card-step completion doubled.
Onboarding · Navigation and home
- 02
I ask for the problem behind the request
The campaign builder came with a roadmap of features. Twenty-two support tickets later, the real bug was one word meaning two different things. We re-cut five phases around it instead of shipping the list.
Campaign builder · Lead lists and import
- 03
I decide once, then write it down
Arguments that keep coming back become rules. In the inbox: if it can be undone, act and offer Undo; if it can't, ask hard. A dozen debates ended, and engineering stopped waiting on me for every edge case.
Inbox · Seats and billing
- 04
Every launch gets a number and a guardrail
And I report both. Onboarding doubled card-step completion and pushed the drop-off to the next step. Navigation shipped and team accounts still lag. Saying so in the same update is what earns the next bet.
Onboarding · Navigation and home
Questions
The short ones are here. Ask anything else below; your questions join this list.
Why I design
I trained as an engineer: computer science, then systems engineering, then a thesis on computer vision. I could make software work. What I couldn't explain was why people kept getting lost in software that worked.
So I moved toward the part I couldn't explain. I built Shopify stores for clients who phoned me whenever a customer got stuck, then joined Expandi as its marketing designer and spent my spare hours reading the support inbox. A year later I was the product designer, and for four years the only one.
Being the only designer teaches you quickly that the screen is the cheap part. The expensive part is the decision behind it: what the default is, what we refuse to build, what the customer sees when the payment fails.
To me, good design is a form of respect: for people's time, their attention, and the work they came to do. Behind every dashboard there's a person at the end of a long day trying to get one thing done. I design for them.
Sidahmed Larbi Youcef
Product designer, Poitiers, France