# Case Study
The Career Platform
That Moves You Forward
Designing a unified AI-powered career platform that replaces five fragmented tools with one intelligent, human-centred experience — for professionals and the organisations hiring them.
# Overview
One platform.
Every career move.
Progrize was born from a simple frustration: building a career in 2024 requires stitching together a dozen disconnected tools. Job boards. LinkedIn. Mentor marketplaces. CV optimisers. Application trackers. Each solves one slice while creating friction everywhere else.
The design challenge was to unify these experiences into one intelligent platform — without sacrificing depth for simplicity — keeping it approachable for a junior developer and powerful for a hiring director.
# Research Methodology
How we found the truth
A mixed-methods research sprint over six weeks — combining qualitative depth with quantitative signal — before a single wireframe was drawn.
User Interviews
Professionals across 5 countries
Diary Studies
2-week job-search observation
Competitor Teardowns
LinkedIn, Glassdoor, MentorCruise, Huntr
Usability Tests
Lo-fi prototype validation sessions
# Competitor Analysis
What the market gets wrong
Every existing tool owns one vertical. None connects the full career journey — and that's the white space Progrize was designed to own.
Massive professional network
Job matching is keyword-based, not intelligent
No mentorship structure or application tracking
Indeed
Largest job database globally
Zero post-application visibility or guidance
No mentorship, no CV intelligence, no tracking
MentorCruise
High-quality vetted mentorship
Isolated — no job search or applications
Mentorship without career context is limited
Huntr
Good application tracker board
No job discovery or mentor connection
Tracker without discovery forces multi-app juggling
# Research Findings
What professionals are really struggling with
Tool Fragmentation
Professionals managed LinkedIn, job boards, mentor platforms, and CV builders separately — losing hours switching context daily.
Invisible Progress
Applications disappeared into black holes. No unified view of where they stood across dozens of active applications.
Mentorship Access Gap
Quality mentorship was gated behind expensive coaches or cold LinkedIn outreach — inaccessible to early-career professionals.
Mismatched Opportunities
Generic job recommendations wasted time. Users needed AI that understood their skill trajectory, not keyword matching.
# User Personas
Designing for two very different mindsets
Ayesha, 27
Junior Software Engineer
Land a senior role within 12 months with mentorship to bridge the skill gap.
- Spends 3+ hours daily juggling platforms
- No feedback after applications go silent
- Can't afford a career coach
"I know I'm qualified — I just can't get in front of the right people."
Marcus, 42
Talent Acquisition Lead
Fill 15 mid-senior roles per quarter without drowning in unqualified CVs.
- 90% of applicants don't match the brief
- Employer branding is an afterthought on most platforms
- No insight into a candidate's growth potential
"I need a signal, not more noise."
# User Journey Map
The emotional arc from frustrated to hired
Mapped against Ayesha's journey — our primary persona — tracking actions, thoughts, emotional state, and design opportunities at each stage.
# AI in the Design Process
How AI accelerated every phase
AI wasn't a finishing touch — it was woven into research, ideation, and prototyping from day one. These are the specific tools and prompts that changed the work.
Uploaded all 28 interview transcripts. Claude clustered recurring themes into 6 insight pillars in under 15 minutes — work that would have taken 2 days manually.
Generated 40+ mood board directions using prompts like 'professional ambition meets calm clarity'. Narrowed to 3 visual directions before a single Figma frame was opened.
Prompted the application tracker dashboard UI in plain English. Had a testable HTML prototype in 20 minutes. Used for guerrilla testing before committing to Figma.
Fed draft personas back to GPT-4 and asked it to identify blind spots. It surfaced career-changer users we had underweighted — a segment that became 30% of beta signups.
Auto-generated responsive layout variants for the dashboard. Reviewed, edited, and merged the strongest patterns rather than building from scratch.
# Design Solution
Six features. One coherent system.
Each feature was validated through lo-fi prototype testing with 12 participants before moving to high-fidelity. North star metric: reduce time-to-meaningful-action from 47 minutes to under 10.
AI Match Engine
Surfaces roles aligned to a user's actual skill trajectory — not keyword matching — reducing irrelevant applications by 60%.
Application Command Centre
A single dashboard tracking every active application, follow-up, and interview stage so nothing falls through the cracks.
1:1 Mentorship Marketplace
Browse and book sessions with 350+ vetted industry experts. Structured session templates ensure every call delivers actionable outcomes.
CV Intelligence
Instant analysis against live job descriptions. Highlights gaps, suggests improvements, and benchmarks against 15,000+ CVs.
Employer Branding Studio
Organisations craft rich company profiles and targeted talent pipelines — attracting quality candidates before a role is posted.
End-to-End Encryption
GDPR-compliant data handling with candidate-controlled privacy settings — trust as a core feature, not an afterthought.
# Outcomes
Results from beta launch
# Next Steps