Smokeball

Project Overview

Smokeball builds practice management software for law firms. I was brought in to strengthen the design team's processes and move several stalled initiatives forward, embedded alongside their existing designers, product managers and engineers.

The constraint

The team was producing pixel-perfect static mockups — slow to make, and impossible to validate properly. A legal workflow either works under real interaction or it does not, and a picture of a screen cannot tell you which. Changing that meant changing habits inside an established team, not just swapping tools.

Approach

• Led the team's early shift from static Figma mockups to AI-assisted prototyping, so interactions were validated as working things rather than images of them. This was well before the practice was common; it has matured with the tooling since.
• Coached designers, product managers and engineers rather than delivering in isolation — the process had to survive my leaving.
• Led UX and product design on high-priority initiatives.
• Built a new product for a different market segment from scratch.
• Created Smokeball's first Figma style guide, giving the growing team a shared foundation.

Outcome

The team moved faster on validation and had, for the first time, a documented design foundation to expand against.