Hey, I'm Schaefer. You need someone who's seen this problem before and fixed it. Every time I have, the team had to agree on direction before the design work could land. I get close enough to know what's working, and far enough out to see what your team can't.
The CEO brought me in to fix the user experience. I thought the job was the app. But the team was spread across health apps, web products and esports coaching.
When the market turned, we narrowed to what helped players get better and ran small revenue experiments. One became the subscription Aimlabs still offers today.
I led a 40+ person design team. Before a major redesign, the business, research and game teams all wanted different things. I ran workshops that shaped one shared vision, which opened Battle.net to games like Call of Duty.
Before the relaunch, I sat down with leadership to get clear on what we were really building. Afterward, engagement and retention rose 15%, and subscriptions rose 2%.
Netflix Games runs like a startup inside Netflix. I turned a handful of solo designers into one 9-person team for the Netflix Game Platform, working hand in hand with product and engineering. That team is still in place.
At Blizzard, I told the whole Battle.net business unit that the way product and design worked together was broken.
Most companies treat design and product strategy as separate conversations. But they never should be.
Great products come from people who trust each other and share a picture of where they're going. When product, design and engineering point the same way, a change in direction gets easier.
I'm best known for doing both: shaping the product vision, and leading the daily work that makes it real. What I'm proudest of is building teams that trust each other enough to do hard things together.
One team. One picture.
By the time the numbers force the question, they've already decided whether to come back. Let's talk about what you're building.