When I joined Hangry, the design was already done. A freelancer had built it before I came on. The natural move was to ship it.
But something felt off.
Instead of letting it go, I went to the stakeholders including C-level, and just asked questions. How do you see Hangry? What makes it different? Where is it going?
The answers made it clear the existing design had borrowed its logic from every other food app out there. Same flow, same assumptions. But Hangry wasn’t trying to be every other food app.
So I proposed something different. The room wasn’t immediately convinced, I was the newest person in it after all. But I came with data, with reasoning, and framed it as a starting point, not a final answer. Something built for where Hangry was now, adjustable as it grew.
They went with it.
What I learned wasn’t really about design. It was about what it means to have an opinion worth defending — and the difference between deferring to the room and actually contributing to it.