What stuck with me wasn't the feature itself — it was realizing how much a "small" decision like an icon name could actually carry, and choosing to ship a fast, focused win instead of chasing something bigger and slower.
The problem
Creators — personal trainers, fitness instructors, wellness coaches — each organize content differently, but the app only offered one rigid course/lesson layout. Their end users had no way to save the workouts, meditations, or recipes that mattered most to them, which hurt engagement and long-term retention.
Finding the opportunity in the backlog
Our quarterly goal was increasing creator LTV through platform engagement. Digging into Canny feedback, I noticed one of the highest-voted requests lined up exactly with that business goal — a quick, high-confidence win hiding in plain sight.
I also looked at how Instagram, LinkedIn, Spotify, and Pinterest each handled "save for later" — bookmark icons, pins, playlists — to ground our naming and iconography in patterns users already knew.
Designing the name and icon with 150+ creators, not for them
A small but high-stakes decision — what to call the feature and which icon to use — would directly shape how thousands of end users understood it. Instead of guessing, I ran a public poll with the creator community: 96 votes and 150+ interactions later, "My favorites" and the star icon won decisively (91%). I then designed the mobile, desktop, and responsive flows in Figma, and prototyped with a closed group of top-tier creators before final handoff.
Handoff, and what came next
I worked closely with the PM to translate the design into clear user stories, then joined the team's planning call to walk through a live demo and answer questions before development started. Throughout the build, I kept the creator community posted with progress updates on the original Canny thread — the same place the request started.
Two follow-ups were high on the list: letting creators mark other content types as favorites (not just lessons), and a search feature — both frequently requested, both connected to the same underlying problem. Development capacity meant we could only take one further at the time, so I documented both as next priorities rather than letting them get lost.
Business impact
The favorites feature shipped across web and mobile, reaching 15,000+ creator apps globally. It was part of a broader research-driven process I put in place as Design Lead, which lifted NPS by 10 points and cut design-to-dev handoff time by 33% — proof that community-informed design decisions ship faster and land better.