Free Trial

A front door you can actually knock

Ada's dashboard was built for implementation staff. As designer and PM on Ada's first growth team, I redesigned it for strangers, shipping a free trial that enabled a product-led growth motion.

The ACME Co home dashboard mid free trial — a welcome header and onboarding prompt above the AI Agent chat widget and its Test/Train panel of sample questions
Impact

>10%*

of new customer revenue driven in the first year

2.5x

higher conversion to pipeline, over traditional inbound

50%

faster time to Closed Won over deals from other sources
*Some data obscured; see full case study for details.
Role
Product Designer & Product Manager (Principal)
Team
1 EM, 3 Engineers — plus a Product Designer from Fall 2025
Timeframe
Mar—Jul 2025 (5 months): Concept to Closed Won
Aug—Sep 2025 (2 months): Iterations
Selected screens

Solution

A few of the flows that take a curious stranger from sign-up to "aha" — a first impression that feels like a real product, an onboarding built around meeting your AI Agent, and a home designed to test and improve it.

TL;DR:

Process Summary

Wearing both hats

I scoped what to build and when and designed the UI/UX that made self-serve activation possible. Presenting roadmap to C-suite one day, prototyping in Figma the next. Strategy and craft lived in the same head, and the trial shipped in five months because of it.

I couldn’t have done what you did in that room.
—Ada's CPTO
After attending my crossfunctional onsite

Designing for strangers

Ada had always been behind a "Book a Demo" link. A free trial meant designing for a brand-new persona: a curious stranger with no training, no implementation manager, and limited patience. That pressure forced UX maturity the product had never needed before.

Composite of the redesigned trial screens — a sample-skillset picker and sample conversation onboarding alongside the home dashboard with content prompts to improve the AI Agent

Design beyond pixels

Turning pixels into a full PLG motion meant designing the service around the screen: how a product-qualified lead hands off to sales, how Ada staff manage a trial, what the whole journey feels like for a customer.

End-to-end customer service blueprint, with swimlanes for Ada staff actions, product features, and data/metrics tooling. (Click to expand)
A “Your trial has ended” dashboard screen next to a not-ready AI Agent chat widget, shown behind the internal backoffice panel for editing the trial's status

View full process

See the full context, including my end-to-end process, trade-offs, and learnings.

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