Product Strategy
Workweek — Professional Communities & Ads Platform
Workweek's newsletter platform evolved into a professional community network — and then doubled down on engagement. Dan led two phases of product design, resulting in daily returning members increasing by 100% and membership applications jumping from 20-30 per month to 150 per day.
The Challenge
Workweek needed to expand beyond newsletters into an interactive professional community platform. The first phase was about building it — messaging, feeds, a user-generated content library. The second phase, nearly a year later, was about making people actually want to come back. Standard community patterns weren't creating the habit loops the product needed.
Our Approach
In phase one, Dan worked closely with Workweek's internal product team to translate requirements into a full community platform design — complete with a robust design system meeting WCAG AA accessibility standards. In phase two, he rethought the core engagement mechanic: standard reply buttons were replaced with AI-categorized, context-relevant response options, and Private Replies were introduced to enable direct messaging with post authors — turning public content into the start of private conversations.
The Outcome
The design system reduced product discovery cycles to two weeks. Daily returning members increased by 100%. Membership applications went from 20-30 per month to 150 per day — a signal that the community had become genuinely worth joining.