Outpace
Building a Coaching Platform from Zero to One
Background
Professional coaching and mentorship suffer from three big problems: limited supply, poor discovery, and inconsistent outcomes. Outpace — founded by experienced mentors from Tinder, Meta, and Netflix — set out to address these challenges with a new digital platform.
Objective
Design a learner-first coaching experience, define the structure for new “Sprints” (interactive courses), and build scalable foundations for both learners and coaches.
Objective
Directed vision exploration, workshops, and design strategy.
Produced user flows, high-fidelity designs, and prototypes.
Balanced scope across shifting priorities and unexpected expansions.
Mentored and coordinated multiple designers across time zones.
Approach
Setting the Vision
Big projects need strong foundations. Early workshops focused on vision alignment and idea generation.
Action: Ran “Blue Sky/Dark Sky” exercises to surface shared hopes and risks, and “Silly 8s” sketching to spark diverse concepts.
Impact: Built early trust, surfaced creative ideas that carried forward, and gave us the raw material for first user flows.
Mapping the Product
With ambitious scope, we needed a framework to guide decisions and trade-offs.
Action: Created a Service Blueprint and Product Map, organizing epics by user journey and priority.
Impact: Gave stakeholders a clear “negotiation table” for scope management, making trade-offs transparent as priorities shifted.
Designing Sprints
At the heart of Outpace was a new learning format: Sprints — interactive, coach-led experiences rather than static courses.
Action: Iterated on Sprint structure: breaking content into weekly sessions, adding deadlines, and defining coach-learner messaging rules.
Impact: Delivered high-fidelity designs and a prototype showing how accountability and coach feedback created a richer learning process.
Expanding Scope to Coaches
Mid-project, we inherited the entire Coach Platform, originally scoped for another partner.
Action: Added a remote designer to the team, adjusted timelines, and partnered directly on design handoffs while mentoring other product designers on the learner side.
Impact: Despite timezone gaps and compressed deadlines, we delivered both platforms (learner mobile app and coach web app) ready for launch.
Outcomes
Dual-Platform Launch
Completed learner mobile and coach web experiences in ~4 months.
Scalable Foundations
Service blueprint and product map set a structure for future growth.
Team Leadership
Balanced scope, onboarded new designers, and maintained momentum through tight deadlines.
Reflections
While Outpace ultimately shut down after 1.5 years due to funding climate, the design process itself was a success:
I learned the value of trusting others and distributing ownership.
Scope management and rapid adaptation became key lessons.
Even without long-term market success, the project validated the need for better coaching frameworks — a problem still worth solving.
