Jeffrey Yu / Product management / Duke University

Product work with the messy parts left in.

I turn user interviews, hard constraints, and failed prototypes into product decisions a team can actually build.

5: People with vision loss in our focus groups
60+: Concepts screened down to one
4: Person team led
1: Design award

Selected work

Case studies that keep the process visible: what users said, where the concepts failed, and why the direction changed.

CALM — Cable-Actuated Locking Mechanism

Everyone we talked to had tried a monitor arm, and every one of them sagged. After our own printed arm snapped at 22.95 lb, we changed direction: instead of replacing the arm, make the arm people already owned hold position.

Design Award Winner

Read the case study

Draft case study02

Icarus

A product story currently being shaped into a full case study, with the focus on problem framing, team direction, and launch tradeoffs.

Case study coming soon

Draft case study03

Betta Plants

A developing project entry that will document the customer problem, product decisions, and evidence behind the final direction.

Case study coming soon

Approach

Talk to the people with the problem

Interviews with the people who actually have the problem — patients, students, operators — not proxies for them.

Translate findings into requirements

Turn what people said into a spec a team can build against, and write down why, so it can be argued with later.

Prototype, validate, ship

Get something real in front of users, check it against what the research asked for, then go again.

About

I'm a product person at Duke University. Most of my work starts the same way: sitting down with the people who have the problem and asking enough questions that the requirements stop being guesses.

On my last project that meant running focus groups with people living with central vision loss, then leading a team of four through 60+ concepts — including killing our own design when a load test proved it wouldn't hold.