Under construction :)

Overview

Remind is a messaging app that helps educators improve student outcomes.

Highlights

• Led design team of 3 senior product designers with 100% retention.
• Attained 30 million monthly active users in over 80% of U.S. public schools.
• Reached No. 1 overall in the app stores for 2 consecutive years on both iOS and Android.
• Rated 4.7/5 from 1.8 million iOS and Android reviews collectively.
• Acquired by Parentsquare in 2023.

How does the app work?

If you can excuse a clichéd startup analogy, Remind is like Slack if it were built specifically for schools.

Unlike email, educators know that Remind messages actually get read. This is because the app adapts to how families prefer to communicate, whether through app notifications, text messages, or voice calls to landlines — and all with automatic translations.

Remind is free for students, parents, and teachers. In 2017, we launched an enterprise version for schools and districts with enhanced features and emergency notifications. This grew to over $30 million in revenue, and we later built a tutoring service to address COVID-related learning loss.

Leading the design team

After 3.5 years of IC product design work at Remind, I transitioned to managing the design team of 3 Senior Product Designers and mentoring 1 Brand Designer.

This was my first time formally leading a team and it surprised me how much I loved it. My superpower is asking questions, which proved useful for understanding complex people-related problems.

I’m proud of the high-craft, high-impact features the design team shipped, from scaling a new revenue stream (Tutoring) to powerful enterprise features for the largest school districts in the U.S.

Over my 18-month tenure, we experienced 100% retention on the design team. In August 2023, I made the difficult decision to leave to start Dozen.

Evolving the design system

When I joined Remind, the design system was a mobile-only Sketch file and color palette. I led its migration to Figma and owned it for 2 years alongside tireless effort from the entire design team and our mobile and full-stack engineering partners.

The Remind Design Language not only let us build faster—it also improved accessibility, consistency, and trust from the students, parents, and educators that rely on Remind. It even got buy-in from our CEO, who appreciated the Lego metaphor we used during an All Hands presentation.

Bridging language barriers

I led a year-long project dedicated to bridging language barriers between educators and the 20% of U.S. families who don’t speak English at home.

We interviewed educators across the country and shipped dozens of improvements, including a preferred language setting and a way to ingest language data from schools.

The project challenged our team to balance the needs of equitable communication with financial implications of translating millions of messages.

I’m most proud that the final product is simple enough for a teacher to use in 5 seconds and powerful enough for an administrator to send an announcement in 100s of languages at once.