For most of my career, I've been a designer – solving customer problems within complex products and technical constraints. A few years ago I took on my biggest challenge yet: designing for users of products I had no idea about. I joined a leveraged trading brokerage and was hit with a wall of acronyms – ETFs, ETPs, CFDs, Turbos, Knock-outs, limits, stops, ATR, Keltner bands, and many more.
I found myself unable to make even simple design decisions, because I didn't understand my customers' behaviours and motivations. The only way to anticipate their needs was to become a trader myself. I opened an account, took courses, got scared, got brave, lost money, made money, read book after book, and asked endless questions to everyone who knew more than me.
Fast-forward 4.5 years and I joined Cloudflare – a familiar challenge with different acronyms: DNS, SSL/TLS, Wranglers, CDNs, bot scores, Argo, TTFB, LCP, load balancing 🙃. Then, simply through timing, a new question emerged: what does AI mean for product design? How should designers embrace it, and when shouldn't they?
Meedo.uk started as an exercise in learning that new domain. It evolved into proof to myself that I could do everything I was helping my team adopt – AI-first product design. But it became much more.
I've had the personal finance bug for years – I'm a fingeek; I trade (a little, not very well), I invest, and I'm tired of relying on spreadsheets. I share what I've learned because I believe finance doesn't need to be as complicated as it is. A few core concepts, properly understood, make everything else click.
Meedo is 100% an outcome of AI-first product design – conceived, designed and built by me + AI, on Cloudflare's infrastructure. 3 weeks from first ideation with Claude to a working SaaS platform; 5 years to learn the space and the customer pain first-hand.
Meedo helps DIY investors manage their own money – simply, smartly. Design, rebalance and track your portfolio's performance. If you're an active DIY investor, check it out free at Meedo.uk – and tell me if it's useful, or if not, why not. It's an MVP that needs to evolve, and you can help shape it.