Desiree BraidoProduct & Strategy · B2B SaaS · Design Director & Product Systems Lead · 2020–2023
Relatus
Designing a complex professional networking platform from vision to product experience.
- Role
- Design Director & Product Systems Lead
- Timeline
- June 2020 to September 2023
- Category
- B2B SaaS / Professional Networking
- Funding
- Approximately $2M raised
My role
Translated an ambitious professional networking vision into product priorities and a coherent experience. Partnered with the CPO to guide design across development and supported investor communication for a company that raised approximately $2 million.
The Challenge
Relatus had an ambitious vision: a single profile encompassing all aspects of a professional's life, its network, goals and ambitions, and using that data to help them achieve more.
The challenge was translating that broad professional networking vision into a coherent, usable product experience, with no established product direction to build on.
Product Strategy & Key Decisions
My individual contribution was direction and systems. I defined the product's visual and experiential direction, built the design system that let a distributed team ship consistently, and partnered with the CPO to turn an ambitious vision into a prioritized sequence of releases.
Prioritization was the hardest part. A platform that wanted to hold a professional's whole life could have built anything, so we chose deliberately: each of the 6 major releases focused on one core loop we could make genuinely good before expanding.
The company's outcomes, including approximately $2M raised, were team achievements. My role in them was specific: the product experience, the design system and the investor materials that made the story legible.
App Structure
Structuring the platform meant defining the information hierarchy and organizing complex functionality into something a person could actually navigate. The product flows and site map below were the working blueprint for that structure.
New User Flow
Product Experience
The final product experience spanned mobile, desktop and tablet. Mobile carried the day-to-day loops: goals, connections and progress in your pocket. The desktop web app was the workspace for deeper planning and exploration, and the tablet experience bridged the two for lean-back use.
Each platform was designed for its context while sharing one design system, so the experience felt like one product everywhere.
Designing for Intelligent Discovery
Relatus explored how AI and relationship intelligence could help professionals discover relevant people, organizations, and opportunities beyond traditional keyword searches.
The data visualization was mine. Relatus held a lot of data about each person's network, goals and progress, and my job was to show it in views a person could read at a glance.
Our technical research explored knowledge graphs, graph based ranking, OpenAI embeddings, semantic search, and similarity matching.
The product challenge was making intelligent discovery understandable and useful without exposing users to the underlying complexity.
Technical team member Bohdan Pavlyshenko developed the research during 2022 and 2023. The research authorship, algorithms and engineering implementation were his work. These were experimental explorations, not confirmed production capabilities.
My contribution focused on the product and experience layer: helping define how intelligent discovery could fit into the broader platform, shaping user interactions, and connecting emerging technical capabilities to the product vision.
Design System
To keep a distributed team shipping consistently, I built a product design system: a reusable component library, interaction patterns and documentation that supported consistency across platforms and releases.