From nothing to a beta developers could use, in six months

A startup wanted to sell container hosting. There was no product, no users, and no agreement on which developers it was for. I was the first designer in.

Infrastructure products get judged in the first ten minutes: can I deploy a thing, and do I understand what I'm paying for. We had neither answer, and the market — Heroku, DigitalOcean, local VDS shops — already did.

Ran discovery interviews with developers and DevOps engineers, then designed the console: deploying a container, reading your bill, managing team access and roles. Built the UI kit and an elevation system so a small team could build a dark, dense product consistently.

I assembled the design team, and found the contractors who launched and ran our content — briefs, contracts, quality on my side; a Habr blog and a Telegram channel on theirs. That filled the lead base before we had a sales team.