Freeplay is a cross-collaborative tool that helps teams build AI products and agents.
My role: Founding Designer
Project Summary
Problem: The two cofounders did not have a product yet, but they had a direction to a problem that they were discovering after rounds of potential customer interviews with AI builders in the industry.
Goal: Define the product and experience vision of Freeplay that the team could use as a north star to incrementally build from.
Impact: Defined the company's first prototype showcasing key features that informed the product's roadmap and direction, aiding in the company raising $3.25 million in seed round funding.
Building AI features was really hard
Before even thinking of designs, I needed to take a step back to understand what exactly we were building. I sifted through notes and video recordings of interviews as well as sitting down with a developer building with large language models to understand his process. At the time, the space was so new, developers used very manual practices.
Inefficiently expensive
Highly specialized engineers were spending expensive hours on evaluation
Manual process
Engineers used spreadsheets to manually and label track LLM interactions
Non-collaborative
Because of the manual process, non-technical stakeholders couldn’t contribute
Talking Tech
After I had enough background on the subject matter, I flew to Boulder and workshopped with the co-founders: a product leader, an engineering leader, and a tight team of contract engineers. Because I was speaking to a highly-technical group about a highly-technical project, I led the workshop tech-first to further my knowledge on how the product was going to be built architecturally and how that may affect the user flow.
The workshop gave the team key features that we wanted to focus in on to shop with potential customers and investors.
Drafting clarity for a complicated and ambiguous product
This fueled my own workflow as I had a direction to head towards that allowed me to draft a user flow that would lay the roadmap ahead. I used this to create a prototype for the cofounders to demo to potential customers and investors as well as inform their future roadmap. The prototype highlighted key features in the flow —
The key highlight of the project were multiplayer reviews. This solved the huge problem of highly-specialized engineers wasting expensive hours on labeling and being able to collaboratively outsource the work with non-technical stakeholders. In order to truly make this accessible, I even designed this piece in both desktop and mobile form factors.
These tests are then available to be viewed at a high level in a "Playlist" page to review how a new prompt performs.
The specific details of this work and the prototype are under NDA, so please reach out for more info!
Impact
While my time was short with Freeplay as a consultant, I'm proud to have contributed to the team with the first prototype showcasing and defining the key features that inform what the product has developed to today. They have since raised $3.25M in seed round funding in 2023, securing $5.6M more in 2025. They just keep growing and I can't help but feel proud!
Lessons Learned
Speaking the same language —
While I worked on complicated things prior to this project, this was the most complex one that I've done so far. Learning from developers was crucial about how the technology worked and where we can introduce quality of life improvements and find opportunities to innovate collaboration. I will never forget the hours of whiteboarding the product's main architecture and having those AHA! moments when the full picture started to click.