Transcend’s school redesign process has been proven over many years, but it was almost entirely analog - it lived in the expertise of their coaches, in workshops and in documents. Before any software could be built, the team needed a shared understanding of what the product actually was and how all of the pieces fit together.

I started with the core object of the work: a school’s blueprint, which includes the school’s components, its portrait of a graduate and how the design changes from a baseline version to an aspirational version. I built a working prototype in React within the first few weeks and wrote a detailed interaction and behavior specification covering views, navigation, side-by-side comparison, comments, saved views and export, so that design decisions were documented and shared instead of living as tribal knowledge.

Leadership needed a demo that showed the full vision of the product: how a Transcend design partner, a school’s design team and the school’s blueprint all connect throughout the redesign process. I designed and co-built three connected applications - a design partner portal, a design team portal and a blueprint builder - that share one component library and one data layer, allowing a presenter to switch between user roles in the middle of a demo and see the work carry over.

AI was designed into the entire flow rather than added as a separate chatbot, guiding users through each step of the process, including a voice conversation mode. Alongside the applications, I wrote production specifications and feature PRDs so that the engineering team could pick up the features that tested well with stakeholders.

School teams already do their work in tools they know - Google Workspace for documents, presentations and calendars, and meeting note-takers like Fathom and Granola for recordings and transcripts. Asking them to move all of that into a new system would add a large barrier to adoption. In 3 days, I built a working prototype that integrated with Google Drive, Docs, Slides and Calendar with two-way (push and pull) sync and AI working alongside the documents, proving the integration approach before engineering time was invested in building it. Meeting notes and transcripts from Fathom and Granola are pulled in as well, so the AI can work from the conversations a team has already had, too.

Much of the redesign process happens in meetings, and the Transcend coach carries the preparation, materials and follow-through for each of them. I built a standalone prototype of the coach’s workspace in about four weeks using Next.js, Claude and Google Workspace. The prototype mirrors the production data model table for table, so anything created in the prototype can be moved directly into the product.

In the workspace, coaches can lay out meetings in order before dates are set and then schedule them all at once, see participants by role and check the readiness of materials for each meeting, working from documents, decks, spreadsheets and recordings that are mirrored from Google Drive. The AI assistant can be opened on any meeting to help the coach prepare, debrief privately or plan next steps - tailoring decks, adapting activities and adding objectives - while only reading the documents the user has permission to open. It can also build a school’s interview questionnaire as a Google Doc from a question bank, with the most important questions first. A read-only team site can then be published to keep the whole team informed.

For the production alpha, I work as both a designer and front-end developer alongside the engineering team, designing and coding new features from scratch in React, TypeScript and SCSS. These have included planning and calendar tools, a step-by-step component evaluation flow, a redesigned library of solutions, implementations and schools, and workspace patterns that are shared across tools. All features are built on the shared theme and component system rather than with one-off styling, keeping the product consistent as it grows.

Tools that are proven in the prototype move into production with handoff documentation for the engineers who pick them up, and production’s blueprint tools are synced back into the prototype so both stay current.