Overview

The Commons is a co-working and community space with genuine care for its members, its team, and the communities it operates in. When I was engaged, they were scaling from 2 to 5 locations, a period of significant operational complexity, and needed both a strategic framework and a clear product development path to support that growth.

I delivered both: a strategic roadmap for 2019, a product development roadmap, and six new features for The Commons native app, all designed to production-ready standard and built around what their customers and operations actually needed.

The Challenge

Scaling a community-focused business is different from scaling a conventional product. Every operational decision has a customer experience consequence, and every product feature either strengthens or erodes the sense of community that makes The Commons distinctive.

The starting point was a backlog of customer complaints that had accumulated without resolution. Getting the strategy right required starting there, with what wasn’t working, before building toward what was possible.

My Role

I worked directly with The Commons leadership team, including the CEO, as their strategic design partner. I was responsible for mapping operational processes, diagnosing root causes, developing the strategic and product roadmaps, and designing new app features through to production-ready specification.

What I Did

Started with the pain. At the beginning of the engagement, I worked through the full backlog of customer complaints with The Commons owners and operational leads. This wasn’t just a research exercise. It became the foundation for the strategic backlog and determined where I directed my effort for the coming months

Built a strategic backlog. Using Trello, I structured the work into three streams: operational, change, and product activity. This gave the leadership team visibility and control over a complex, multi-workstream program of change.

Made the app the centrepiece. The Commons native app emerged as the highest-leverage product focus, particularly the opportunity to drive revenue by enabling customers to purchase room booking credits directly through the app. I worked closely with the CEO and a full-stack engineer to design a feature backlog that filled the full 2019 product roadmap.

Delivered production-ready designs. All designs were component-based, linked to user stories on Trello, and ready for development, with no handoff gap and no ambiguity for the engineering team.

Features Delivered

• Meeting rooms booking feature
• Credits and transactions feature
• Profile page redesign
• Messaging and chat redesign
• Complaint lodgement feature
• Space management feature

Plus: The Commons strategic roadmap for 2019 and a full product development roadmap.

Result

Six features delivered to production-ready standard, a strategic roadmap, and an operational framework, all within a single engagement. The Commons is the kind of client that makes this work rewarding: genuinely customer-centric leadership that is willing to look honestly at what isn’t working and committed to doing something about it.

”The team at The Commons truly cares about their people, their customers and their community.”

When a leadership team operates with that level of integrity, the design process moves faster, the decisions are better, and the outcomes show it.