Intterra | Founding design at a public safety start-up
Intterra builds software that helps public safety agencies manage emergencies and share trusted, real-time information with the public. I joined as the company’s first designer, with no process to inherit, and built a four-phase design lifecycle that still shapes how the company ships today.
Timeline
February 2026 - July 2026
Role
Principal Designer
THE PROBLEM
A company that had never had an internal designer
I discovered a significant gap in communication. Intterra had worked with several contract design agencies prior to my arrival, all of whom had been fairly hands-off with internal teams. No systems supported cross-communication between design and other teams.
THE APPROACH
A four-phase system, built from scratch
I built a four-phase design lifecycle, rooted in agile principles, that still shapes how the company ships design today.
PHASE 1
Intake
PHASE 2
Disovery
Competitive analysis of existing public safety apps.
A persona built from discovery interviews and surveys.
An early low-fidelity concept for the incident form, before visual design.
PHASE 3
Design handoff
Handoff guidelines: final screens, error states, and loading states, documented for every feature.
Prioritizing accessibility
Checking contrast ratios in Stark before a design ever reached handoff.
PHASE 4
Implementation & QA
A shipped flow from the Implementation and QA phase, tested and approved before release.
What shipped
In six months, I built the agile design lifecycle Intterra still runs on: four phases held together by open communication. I trained colleagues new to agile design, and left behind a system built for a team that didn’t exist yet.
SPEED OF DEVELOPMENT
+90%
Faster releases compared to before the process existed.
TEAMS TRAINED
2
Product owners and developers on shipping WCAG 2.1 AA accessible designs.
ZERO TO SHIPPED
6 Months
One designer, zero process, to a system the company still ships on.
The design lifecycle, from intake to implementation, with open communication looped through every phase.
Lessons learned
Culture doesn’t scale on trust alone. It scales when the process is written down, repeatable, and easy for a new teammate to pick up without me in the room, which is why documentation became as much a part of the job as the designs themselves.
Intterra | Founding design at a public safety start-up
Intterra builds software that helps public safety agencies manage emergencies and share trusted, real-time information with the public. I joined as the company’s first designer, with no process to inherit, and built a four-phase design lifecycle that still shapes how the company ships today.
Timeline
February 2026 - July 2026
Role
Principal Designer
THE PROBLEM
A company that had never had an internal designer
I discovered a significant gap in communication. Intterra had worked with several contract design agencies prior to my arrival, all of whom had been fairly hands-off with internal teams. No systems supported cross-communication between design and other teams.
THE APPROACH
A four-phase system, built from scratch
I built a four-phase design lifecycle, rooted in agile principles, that still shapes how the company ships design today.
PHASE 1
Intake
Intake meant aligning with product on requirements and timelines before design began. I used Rovo to capture meeting notes and translate conversations across product, design, and engineering, catching gaps early and drafting the first shared requirements.
PHASE 2
Disovery
PHASE 3
Design handoff
The largest phase I built: solutioning, prototyping, and developer handoff. I defined exactly what a design needed before it was handoff-ready, for me and for whoever joined the design team next.
Prioritizing accessibility
Coming from banking, I knew what ADA compliance meant for a product’s reach. I built it into handoff requirements from day one and trained both product and development teams on what meeting that bar looked like.
PHASE 4
Implementation & QA
Once designs were in developers’ hands, I stayed available for questions and worked hands-on through the build. I sat in on demos, owned QA and approval, and looped back to handoff for unspec’d edge cases. I kept testing and ran monthly audits to keep the system on track.
What shipped
A shipped flow from the Implementation and QA phase, tested and approved before release.
SPEED OF DEVELOPMENT
90%
Faster releases compared to before the process existed.
TEAMS TRAINED
2
Product owners and developers on shipping WCAG 2.1 AA accessible designs.
ZERO TO SHIPPED
6 Months
One designer, zero process, to a system the company still ships on.
Lessons learned
I solved the system’s visual and structural problems first, then circled back to incident entry, the loudest complaint from research. Next time, I’d tackle that in parallel from day one, and pressure-test the merge flow with two agencies working it at once before launch.
Intterra | Founding design at a public safety start-up
Intterra builds software that helps public safety agencies manage emergencies and share trusted, real-time information with the public. I joined as the company’s first designer, with no process to inherit, and built a four-phase design lifecycle that still shapes how the company ships today.
Timeline
February 2026 - July 2026
Role
Principal Designer
THE PROBLEM
A company that had never had an internal designer
I discovered a significant gap in communication. Intterra had worked with several contract design agencies prior to my arrival, all of whom had been fairly hands-off with internal teams. No systems supported cross-communication between design and other teams.
THE APPROACH
A four-phase system, built from scratch
I built a four-phase design lifecycle, rooted in agile principles, that still shapes how the company ships design today.
PHASE 1
Intake
Intake meant aligning with product on requirements and timelines before design began. I used Rovo to capture meeting notes and translate conversations across product, design, and engineering, catching gaps early and drafting the first shared requirements.
PHASE 2
Discovery
Competitive analysis of existing public safety apps.
A persona built from discovery interviews and surveys.
An early low-fidelity concept for the incident form, before visual design.
PHASE 3
Design handoff
The largest phase I built: solutioning, prototyping, and developer handoff. I defined exactly what a design needed before it was handoff-ready, for me and for whoever joined the design team next.
Handoff guidelines: final screens, error states, and loading states, documented for every feature.
Prioritizing accessibility
Coming from banking, I knew what ADA compliance meant for a product’s reach. I built it into handoff requirements from day one and trained both product and development teams on what meeting that bar looked like.
Checking contrast ratios in Stark before a design ever reached handoff.
PHASE 4
Implementation & QA
Once designs were in developers’ hands, I stayed available for questions and worked hands-on through the build. I sat in on demos, owned QA and approval, and looped back to handoff for unspec’d edge cases. I kept testing and ran monthly audits to keep the system on track.
A shipped flow from the Implementation and QA phase, tested and approved before release.
What shipped
In six months, I built the agile design lifecycle Intterra still runs on: four phases held together by open communication. I trained colleagues new to agile design, and left behind a system built for a team that didn’t exist yet.
SPEED OF DEVELOPMENT
+90%
Faster releases compared to before the process existed.
TEAMS TRAINED
2
Product owners and developers on shipping WCAG 2.1 AA accessible designs.
ZERO TO SHIPPED
6 Months
One designer, zero process, to a system the company still ships on.
A shipped flow from the Implementation and QA phase, tested and approved before release.
Lessons learned
Culture doesn’t scale on trust alone. It scales when the process is written down, repeatable, and easy for a new teammate to pick up without me in the room, which is why documentation became as much a part of the job as the designs themselves.