Context
Investing talk online has a verification problem. People post the wins and hide the losses. Commonstock’s fix was to link your real brokerage account so your track record was provable, then put the social layer on top of real positions. It worked, and investors believed it: $34M from Coatue, QED and Floodgate, with Bill Ackman and Ari Emanuel writing angel checks.
When I showed up, one designer was supporting dozens of engineers. The component library had grown one feature at a time with no shared architecture: duplicate button variants, type scales that differed between the portfolio view and the feed, and a handoff process where engineers reinterpreted every spec. Leadership was already thinking about an exit, and a buyer’s diligence team would be looking at exactly this. I reported to the CEO and the Director of Product.
Contribution
Team first. I hired two designers and set up what makes three people a function: weekly crit, one component inventory, one source of truth for specs. My own output dropped to almost nothing in the first weeks while I interviewed. That was the cost.
System second, and the real decision was sequencing. A full rebuild would’ve frozen feature work for a quarter, and the roadmap couldn’t take that. I audited the library, ranked components by how often they showed up across the product, and split them into consolidate (merge the dupes, keep the API) and rebuild (portfolio chart, position card, feed post). Rebuilds shipped with the features that touched them, so no engineer ever got a system update without a reason to adopt it. The long tail paid for that: some low-frequency components were still inconsistent when I left.
The data-dense surfaces were mine directly: live portfolio performance, position-level charts, and the social signals sitting on real brokerage activity. Everything hangs off one fact, that a trade in the app is a real trade pulled from a linked brokerage, so every surface had to make that legible. A linked account turns every buy and sell into a trade alert, puts the member’s return and holdings on their profile with a verified check, and shows how much money follows them. When a trade synced, the app asked why. That prompt went through three iterations on iOS before it settled on a card on the trade itself.
Third job, harder to name: getting ready to be bought. I worked with the CEO and Director of Product on which surfaces a buyer would see first and made sure the new system reached those. That’s roadmap work, not design work, and it was most of what the title meant.
The screens below are from the team’s working files, 2021 to 2022, some dev-ready specs and some the last iteration before one. The work was the team’s to draw and mine to direct.
Outcome
Yahoo bought Commonstock in August 2023 and folded it into Yahoo Finance, which had over 150 million monthly users at the time. The system I rebuilt is the one they inherited.
