Luxury auctions for the 21st century.

The Challenge

In order to raise a Series D round ahead of a possible IPO, Auctionata needed to build a mobile app that would impress potential investors. Members of the senior management team had very different (and often conflicting) views of our target market.

Auctionata was going through a contentious rebranding effort that created a deep rift between the management, product, and creative teams. Because of this, stakeholder management, crisis management, and consensus-building skills were extremely important.

My Role

The mobile product team consisted of 5 devs, a visual designer, a QA, and a Scrum Master. They had joined several months before me, but were left with no direction or leadership and were threatening to leave. My task was to reinvigorate the team and refocus them on the goal of launching an extremely technically complex app before the funding round closed in 90 days.

This involved taking over the UX strategy and research functions, managing the visual designer and providing her with design reviews and a pattern library and UX guide, facilitating discovery workshops, and very intensive stakeholder management to keep political forces and arbitrary change requests at bay.

My Contribution

  • Discovery
  • Strategy
  • Research