Ginko, a digital wellness app

Product Strategy | Experience Design | Visual Storytelling

Client: Ginko—an early-stage digital wellness startup helping families build healthier relationships with screen time.

Problem: Most parental control tools focus on restriction and surveillance, creating tension rather than trust. Ginko needed an MVP story that could support early fundraising—in five weeks.

Goal: Define a focused product narrative that clearly communicated Ginko's value, philosophy, and differentiation to investors.

Role: Designer working with a design lead over a five-week sprint. I helped shape and facilitate discovery, contributed to competitive analysis and persona development, and designed key storyboards that illustrated the product vision.

Approach: Discovery workshop, competitive analysis, persona and journey mapping, and high-fidelity storyboards focused on a small number of high-impact moments—optimizing for clarity and belief over feature completeness.

Outcome: The work gave founders a clear, investor-ready narrative they could repeat consistently across pitch conversations. Ginko raised $1.5M in seed funding in May 2025 and has since launched in early access.

Ginko was designed to be different from existing parental control tools. Where competitors emphasize monitoring and enforcement, Ginko focused on education, self-awareness, and communication between parents and kids.

The founders needed an MVP story that could support early fundraising—but with only five weeks, we had to prioritize ruthlessly. Success wasn't about feature completeness. It was about helping investors quickly understand what this product is, who it's for, and why it's meaningfully different.

What made this hard

Big vision, tight timeline

An evolving brand identity that needed to stay focused

Designing interconnected parent and child experiences that both needed to feel considered

Key decisions

We made a deliberate tradeoff early: focus on storytelling through a small number of high-impact moments rather than designing a full end-to-end product. This kept the narrative focused and credible while avoiding overcommitment to unvalidated build decisions.

We narrowed the MVP to four features that clearly showed the product's value:

Settings — establishing shared expectations

Speed Bumps — intentional pauses for reflection

Digital Wellness Visualizer — surfacing patterns and impact

Notifications — reinforcing awareness without shame

Instead of a functional prototype, we created high-fidelity storyboards that combined wireframes and visual design—illustrating how the product works and why it's different.

We began with a one-day, in-person workshop that I helped shape and facilitate alongside the design lead. Together with the founders, we aligned on product vision, identified parent and child pain points, reviewed the competitive landscape, and agreed on which moments mattered most in investor conversations.

This alignment allowed us to narrow scope early and move quickly with confidence.

Competitive Analysis

We reviewed existing digital wellness and parental control tools to understand how the market currently addresses screen time and family dynamics:

Bark — surveillance-driven, monitoring-first, parent-controlled

OurPact — control-driven, blocking and enforcement over collaboration

One Sec — interruption-driven, habit disruption without deeper context

Ginko intentionally took a different stance—emphasizing education, self-awareness, and communication over restriction.

Personas & User Journeys

To reflect real family dynamics, we created two personas: Hugo (42), a parent trying to support healthier habits without damaging trust, and Lucy (14), a teen navigating autonomy and screen use.

Designing parallel journeys allowed us to understand not only individual experiences, but how the app mediated communication between parents and kids—central to Ginko's philosophy.

Storyboards

Instead of building a functional prototype, we created four high-fidelity storyboards illustrating the most important moments in the experience. These combined wireframes and visual design to clearly communicate how the product works and why it's different.

The final deliverables gave the founding team a clear, investor-ready MVP narrative they could use consistently across pitch conversations. The work helped elevate the perceived maturity of the product while leaving room for future iteration.

Ginko raised $1.5M in seed funding in May 2025 and has since launched in early access.

Challenges

Big vision within a tight five-week timeline

Navigating an evolving brand identity while keeping design focused

Designing interconnected parent and child experiences

Learnings

High-fidelity storyboards can be more effective than prototypes when the goal is alignment and belief—not usability validation

A small number of well-chosen moments can communicate product value more clearly than a complete build

Early alignment on what an MVP needs to prove reduces downstream churn

Wins

Supported a strong discovery kickoff that aligned founders early

Delivered polished, investor-ready visuals

Crafted a product story rooted in empathy, education, and behavior change

Work contributed to a successful $1.5M raise