context
The product worked, but people struggled to use it
Fuerte is a scheduling platform for pharmaceutical reps and medical practices. I joined as the first engineer and owned much of its design and engineering as we prepared it for production: an Expo React Native mobile app, a TanStack Start React web app, in-app messaging and event updates over Pusher WebSockets, Stripe subscriptions, a tRPC API running on AWS, and a CI/CD pipeline putting four zero-downtime deploys into production a week.
None of that was the problem. Users churned anyway. Fuerte was supposed to be the faster way for reps and providers to schedule visits, and it already had the features it needed to be that. People just had to work to find them. Our users' comfort with software varies a lot, so the app had to be clear enough to be useful to all of them on day one.
design
Good instincts were no longer enough
I had always cared about interfaces, and making them intuitive was already one of my strengths. Fuerte put that strength under greater pressure. For our users, easy and fast were not polish; they were the whole reason to open the app at all.
Instinct had gotten me to good, but the product needed great. So I made design a more deliberate practice. I studied the apps whose interfaces I admired to understand what held their systems together, and I followed design engineers whose vocabulary I could apply directly to Fuerte's screens.
The changes went out incrementally, in the flows people spend their time in: finding offices, searching events, requesting samples, and messaging. I rebuilt each one around the single thing someone came to that screen to do.
outcome
134 reps, 246 providers, and a network still growing
Fuerte scaled to 134 reps across 10+ states and 246 providers at 80 practices, and the user base has kept growing since.
Fuerte turned an existing strength into a discipline. I came away better able to explain why an interface works, build systems that keep it coherent, and use design as deliberately as engineering. It shaped the kind of engineer I want to keep becoming: someone who cares equally about how a product works and how it feels.