Situation
As generative AI began reshaping software, Vagaro's leadership asked: what would AI mean for our customers? Small business owners—our primary users—are time-strapped, often running their business solo, and overwhelmed by administrative complexity. They don't need more features. They need someone to help them make sense of what they already have.
My Role
I led the product vision work for Vera: defining what the AI assistant should be, what problems it should solve first, how it should speak and behave, and how it would fit into Vagaro's existing product surface. I partnered closely with our product leadership, data team, and engineering platform team.
How I Brought Order
I started by talking to users—not about AI, but about the hardest parts of running their business. I conducted 12 qualitative sessions and synthesized the themes: scheduling confusion, revenue blind spots, staff communication, and customer retention. Those became the four problem domains Vera would address first.
Design Work
Created a full product brief covering Vera's personality and communication principles, the four initial use cases with example conversations, the integration model within the existing Vagaro app, and the data requirements for personalization. Designed a prototype of the conversational UI and presented it to Vagaro's executive team. Built a framework for how we'd evaluate whether AI responses were helpful, accurate, and safe.
Impact
Vera became a funded initiative within Vagaro's 2025 roadmap. The product brief I wrote became the north star document for the initial engineering build. Three of the four use cases I defined were greenlit for Phase 1. The conversation design principles I established were adopted by the AI implementation team.
Reflection
Designing AI products is mostly about trust design. Users don't need the AI to be impressive—they need to feel confident it won't embarrass them or lead them astray. That means being precise about what Vera knows, honest about what it doesn't, and extremely careful about how it communicates uncertainty. AI without guardrails is just a liability. AI with thoughtful design is a business advantage.