Design & Product Management • Ooreka

TL;DR

Led product design for Ooreka, a content-based website editor that scaled to 460 specialized websites reaching 20 million unique visitors monthlyince I was the first designer, I defined the user experience, visual identity, and design system while establishing an industrialized framework to maintain consistency across the entire platform.

The challenge: designing at industrial scale

Ooreka’s ambitious model—publishing highly targeted content across hundreds of specialized domains—required maintaining design consistency, user experience quality, and brand coherence across a massive, rapidly growing ecosystem.

As the first employee of the startup and the first designer, I faced the challenge of creating a framework robust enough to scale industrially while remaining flexible enough to serve diverse content types and user needs.

My approach

1. Discovery: aligning business and user needs

• Stakeholder collaboration: Gathered requirements from CEO and marketing teams to understand business objectives
• User research: Conducted A/B testing campaigns, lab usability tests, and AT Internet data analysis to validate assumptions
• Information architecture: Designed scalable IA patterns adaptable across 460 different subject domains
• Custom CMS: Partnered with CTO & editorial team to identify technical constraints and industrialization opportunities to built and improve a custom CMS

2. Design: building systems for scale

• Responsive UX/UI: Created user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and design systems ensuring consistent experience across devices
• Functional conception: Defined user workflows, feature specifications, user stories, and interaction patterns for all platform features
• Design system: Established reusable components and templates enabling rapid, consistent website deployment
• Brand identity: Developed cohesive visual language extending across websites, print ads, radio campaigns, and video content

3. Optimize: continuous improvement through data

• SEO integration: Collaborated on content and UX patterns optimized for search performance
• Performance monitoring: Worked closely with CTO to ensure platform speed and reliability at scale
• Iterative testing: Used analytics and user testing to refine features and validate design decisions
• Template industrialization: Created systematic processes enabling efficient deployment of new websites (up to 10 website per week)

Outcomes

• Scalable platform: Successfully deployed 460 specialized websites maintaining design and UX consistency
• Massive reach: Achieved 20 million monthly unique visitors through user-centered design and SEO optimization
• Industrialized process: Created reusable systems dramatically reducing time-to-market for new properties
• Unified brand: Established coherent identity across digital platforms and traditional media channels

Key learnings

• Systems thinking is survival: At industrial scale, every design decision must consider reusability and systematic implementation
• Constraints breed creativity: Limited resources forced elegant, scalable solutions rather than bespoke approaches
• Data grounds intuition: Balancing qualitative user insights with quantitative analytics validated design at scale
• Cross-functional partnership: Close collaboration with CTO transformed technical constraints into design opportunities

Beyond delivery: The real achievement was architecting design infrastructure that could scale from dozens to hundreds of properties while maintaining quality—proving that systematic thinking and user-centered design aren’t opposing forces.