Natalia L'Abbate

First things first. Understanding and strategy means getting to know where your business and product stand today, and where we should be heading next to achieve your goals and drive growth. I focus on business goals, align expectations with stakeholders, and look at the market for a competitive analysis. This phase also defines success metrics and KPIs upfront, so we have clear criteria to evaluate decisions throughout the process.

I get to know your clients and users — their needs, goals, and mental models — so we can match those to your business goals. I may also analyse current content and product through the lens of best practices, so we can build hypotheses, validate them, and gain enough certainty to define what to do next. Methods: interviews, surveys, contextual observation, usability testing, and analytics review — chosen based on time and resources.

Now that we know where your business is heading and what your users need, I create information architecture, user flows, and wireframes to validate that the idea makes sense for the target audience. I think several steps ahead to avoid rework. Depending on time and level of certainty, I work across fidelity levels, from sketches to detailed mockups, and prepare a prototype ready for testing. This phase includes a design system check or creation.

As soon as the prototype is ready, we test with real users to check if we're actually solving their problems, moderated or unmoderated, whichever fits best. Depending on results we either move to final adjustments and handoff, or step back, redesign what wasn't clear, and test again until we're confident. I document all findings and share them with the broader team so everyone is aligned before handoff.

My main goal here is to make sure PMs, BAs, Devs, and QAs have everything they need, well documented, to move forward. I stay in close communication so everything runs smoothly, and when it doesn't, we get back on track together. Where it makes sense, I create a metric follow-up strategy (or propose A/B tests, feature flags, or phased rollouts if uncertainty is still high) and use analytics to iterate and keep improving the product.