Fueled

Congratulations to Fueled team members from our Content Solutions Practice who were recently #promoted! We’re grateful for the expertise, care, and collaboration you bring to Fueled every day. Kelvin Balloo, QA Expert, Quality Assurance Manager Lee Brannan, Lead Content Operations Specialist Stephanie Campbell, Associate Director, Product Design Rachael Cortellessa, Principal UX Designer Preston Davies, Lead Engineer, Front-End Olivia De Alba, Associate Director, Product Design Interested in joining our global, fully remote team? Check out our open positions on LinkedIn or at Fueled.com/careers.

Planet 9 came to Fueled with an early AI-built prototype of Neelo, an educational iPad app designed to help children build life skills through play. The prototype proved the concept. What it lacked was the structure needed to scale, evolve, and support a production release. Our mobile apps team rebuilt Neelo while staying intentionally AI-first. The difference was not whether AI was used, but how. Experienced practitioners guided architecture, product decisions, and quality control, armed with internal tooling that equips AI development platforms with Fueled’s standards, workflows, and review practices. The result: a production-grade app foundation designed to grow with the product, its audience, and Planet 9’s long-term vision. https://lnkd.in/dqcnt2VX

Happy anniversary! 🙌

Congratulations to the Fueled team members in our Digital Product Practice who were recently promoted! We’re grateful for your leadership, craft, and continued impact. Seena A., Senior Director, Quality Assurance Nícholas Oliveira, Senior Director, Web Engineering Victoria C., Senior Product Designer Jayna Fey, Associate Director, Project Management Pooja Padamad, Senior Quality Assurance Analyst Luiz Cláudio Nogueira, Lead, Web Applications Shaelyn Ventrano, PMP, CSM, Lead Project Manager Interested in joining our global, fully remote team? Check out our open positions on LinkedIn or at Fueled.com/careers.

Too often, digital product research is treated as if the readout is the end of the UX researcher’s work: scope the study, run the sessions, synthesize the findings, present the deck, and move on. The work may be rigorous. The findings may be sharp. But if they never meaningfully shape what gets built, the business value is limited. At Fueled, we push for research to be embedded across the product lifecycle, not brought in episodically to produce a presentation. That means researchers are in the room for design reviews, build conversations, and the in-flight tradeoffs that determine what actually changes in the product. Once a finding is handed from researcher to product manager to designer to engineer, it can become a telephone game: compressed, translated, and reprioritized, with everyone left hoping the original insight survived the handoff. Keeping researchers in the conversation reduces that loss and focuses more of the team’s time on turning insight into product change, not re-explaining what the research meant. Design Director Paige Maguire calls for a rethink of the readout-as-finish-line model in our latest blog post. 🏁 https://lnkd.in/gdDTifqf

This evening, CEO Justin Livesay will be attending The Webby Awards. He'll be there with several of our friends and partners, including Wide Eye, our close partner in delivering one of our nominated projects this year, the new Southern Poverty Law Center website. We're proud to have a long history with this "best of the internet" award programs, with more than 20 nominations and awards across our team's collective history. This year, Senior Director Paige Maguire also served as a judge. At the start of this year's nominating process, we shared her take on award worthy criteria in this era of digital change: https://lnkd.in/gg44X2em Thank you to our partner WP Engine for the invitation!

For the Good Housekeeping UK Kitchen app, we worked within a proven mobile framework and extended it with custom features designed specifically for cooking and discovery. Swipe-to-discover browsing and a guided Cooking Mode added new layers of interaction, while preserving the reliability of the underlying platform. By engineering modular, React-based components that integrate seamlessly into the app architecture, we created an experience that feels polished, intuitive, and purpose-built. A strong foundation, thoughtfully extended to support a more engaging product experience. https://lnkd.in/g76zShk2

⚙️ For enterprise teams, the best mobile architecture often builds on the organization’s existing engineering ecosystem. If a team already has mature #React and #TypeScript investments including shared design systems, accessibility standards, analytics patterns, and development workflows, React Native can be a natural extension while also delivering native interfaces. That approach worked well with Goosehead Insurance. We shipped a cross-platform app aligned with their other React-based work and Salesforce-centered backend, while still going native where it mattered, including Apple Wallet. Our VP of Engineering & Technology Sage Y. explains how we evaluate React Native vs Flutter vs native. https://lnkd.in/gedxPAqs

A digital product can hit every internal milestone and still miss the market. The team can ship on time. The interface can be polished. The roadmap can be approved. The launch can look successful from the inside. But the real measure of product success is whether people choose it and keep using it. In our latest blog post, Jessica Wagner, our Managing Partner for Digital Product, describes four habits of teams that create digital products people actually use, with concrete project examples: 🔎 They start with the problem, not the feature list   ↩️ They design for reasons to return, not just ease of use   ⚡ They test for real demand, not polite approval   🎯 They define success before scope https://lnkd.in/g8Et7Gmd

You might have seen my recent title update and wondered what I’m actually doing over here. 😊 I joined Fueled to focus on a specific area within the Platform Extensions team. We build and maintain client-owned software that connects and extends platforms. Think connecting a SaaS platform to WordPress or Webflow, or extensions that expand what those platforms can do. The work itself wasn’t new. The team had already built a strong foundation across several portfolios with dozens of products. My role has been building on that. Figuring out what technical product ownership looks like in this space across different clients, platforms, and levels of complexity. Generally, that means making tradeoffs clear to clients, and helping them set priorities, create roadmaps, or navigate technical constraints without losing sight of what they’re trying to achieve. That work has quickly turned into defining the discipline itself. Now I’m stepping into a role where I get to formalize that. Not just doing the work, but shaping how it shows up across the team. 💪