Leading UX Design at WHOOP

Bringing the human into human performance through a reimagined user experience design process.

Role
UX Design Manager

Team Size
5

Disciplines
UX, Research, Writing

Company
WHOOP

Domain
Fitness & Wellness

Time in Role
January 2022—March 2024

It’s a challenge to humanize data.

WHOOP, a company committed to unlocking human performance, has spent the last decade prioritizing precision and quality in data—making it easier than ever to gain insights into how our bodies are performing. Anchored in the principle of being "backed by science," WHOOP enables wearable subscribers with access to this high-quality, granular data. They’ve been the first to market on many fronts, as well as being recognized leaders in product design after winning the Red Dot Award in 2016.

However, despite their dedication to innovation, understanding what the wearable data is telling you about your body requires a steep learning curve. WHOOP subscribers join eager to improve themselves, but for those who aren't keen on conducting their own research on how to act on the daily scores they see, they are faced with a complicated, disjointed, and intimidating user experience. The design looks great, feels comfortable, and truly fits an innovative consumer gap, so what’s the problem?

In my first few months at WHOOP in 2021, I observed a growing disconnect among the team on how we defined the quality of design solutions: the visual design was already award-winning, yet there were a lot of expensive blindspots in solving the right problems.

In the last three years at WHOOP, I’ve served a mission to bring the human into human performance.

Check out WHOOP

“One of the qualities that sets Beth apart is her unwavering commitment to putting the team first. Her dedication to fostering a collaborative and supportive environment has significantly contributed to our team's cohesion and success. It's evident that she prioritizes the collective goals and well-being of the team, ensuring that everyone feels valued and included at all times. What truly stands out is her ability to lead with a genuine, fun attitude, even amidst a chaotic or stressful environment.

Her positive energy is infectious, creating an atmosphere that inspires creativity and camaraderie.

Her approach brings a sense of joy to the workplace, making it a more enjoyable and productive space for all of us. Her authenticity and warmth contribute to building a strong team culture, where individuals feel comfortable expressing their ideas and collaborating effectively.”

— Alyssa Carofano, Head of Strategic Program Operations

Senior Product Designer

Hired to craft the future B2B product experience.
Hear my story about WHOOP Unite.

April 2021–January 2022 (7mo.)

Lead Product Designer

Promoted to supervise all web experiences, w/ 2 direct reports. Served as a hybrid player/coach, leading design for B2B and supervising Growth and Support.

January 2022–July 2022 (6mo.)

Product Design Manager

Promoted to supervise all internal designers, establishing our team’s niche in UX & UXR in partnership with Germany-based Visual Designers. Grew to 5 direct reports.

July 2022–March 2024 (1yr 8mo.)

I opened up my phone one morning to a text from my boss saying he’d been canned. At 7:30am on January 13, 2022, I thought he was joking. His second text told me that two other peers of mine were also laid off.

Then, as if on cue, an invitation came for me for a 1:1 with our Director of Product that started in 10 minutes. I wish I could say I started making peace with the possibility that I was also about to lose my job, but I was freaking out. I joined the call feeling like I was about to empty the contents of my stomach to learn that my fate was not only safer, but it was the opposite—I was getting promoted. In fact, I was getting promoted into my past manager’s job… sort of.

When I was hired at WHOOP as a senior designer, they were going through hyper growth on their design team. I was designer number 7, interviewing other design candidates on my second day, and we grew to a team of 21 designers within my first 2 months. We had an amazing design director who came from Uber with a vision to redefine how design was done at WHOOP. However, things didn’t go her way when she abruptly quit after 6 months. Soon after, the talent she hired began to quit in droves. Any strong design leadership presence dissolved instantly, and the consequence led to individual designers being pulled in many conflicting directions. We started losing 2 designers a month, and in January, the team went through a restructure to lay off 3 more people to bring us back down to 12. Four of us who were considered high performers were promoted to Lead Product Designers with 1-2 other designers now reporting to us.

So this led me to being promoted into “sort of” my past manager’s job—the design manager role was abolished in favor of hybrid player/coach roles. We were to continue our daily operations, but now in addition to having a few others to mentor and look out for. Fast forward by a few months—things continued to get worse before they got better.

Designers continued to quit, and Glassdoor reviews were tanking about the toxic company culture, lack of diversity and input, and lost sense of future without focus.

Despite my forced pathway into management, I found a new fire in my gut with helping other designers regain their confidence and relationship with their stakeholders to feel more in control of the work they were doing. I wasn’t great at it at first—needing to make hard calls where I realized I was being too empathetic and not holding the line on quality design work—but these turbulent times made me realize I wanted to fully lean into the manager role. In June, I made a case to our new VP of Product to move into a full-time management role and hire a backfill designer to take over my IC work on WHOOP Unite. Tied with a 30-60-90 day plan we co-designed, I was then promoted in July and slowly regrew the team over nearly two more years. I began running team building workshops, creating resources, tutorials and worksheets to level up our design team, investing in my leaderships skills through books, courses, and sought external mentorship. Soon I began to find my feet in this new role, and we had no more designers quit for over a year and a half.

This is my story on what we accomplished together in that time.

Before we dig into the details, let’s talk about where we landed. Starting in the full-time management role, I ran workshops with our team to define a crisper vision of how our work serves a greater goal to advance the business, and how we as individual designers seek to show up in our work. I finalized the following statements after gaining this input to mobilize us around.

How might we better serve the everyday wellness seeker, expanding our member base from highly motivated fitness enthusiasts?

Overall goal for UXD

Design Charter

As WHOOP designers, we empower people who use the products we create to build healthy behaviors through habitual and enjoyable use. We are experts about our users, seeking to deeply understand the people we’re designing for by talking to them, observing what they do, and keeping them at the center of the creation process. We ask questions that challenge current mental models to push our teams’ creative confidence. We are key voices in distilling vague possibilities into tangible outcomes. We do user research, information architecture, interaction design, visual design, and service design alongside our teammates and stakeholders to co-create useful, usable, and delightful experiences.

Notable Wins

110%

Increase in Daily Active Users (DAU) in 2 years from expanding our target user base, measured between Jan 2022–Mar 2024.

91%

User Retention Rate over first 4 weeks from user acquisition, as of Jan 2024. The first month is critical to gaining value as an ongoing subscriber.

82

System Usability Scale (SUS) by end of 2023. I introduced SUS as a company-wide OKR w/ quarterly measurements.

x2

Average design tests run with users a week as of Jan 2024. I radically cut down the time to gather user input from months to days.

How did I get these numbers, you ask? I pulled the difference from when I started my management journey to when I made the decision to depart from the team 2 years later. It’s vital to remember that it takes a village to see success like this—while I am offering a correlation that big leaps were made in the time that I was leading the UX team at WHOOP, we saw the business grow as a result of dozens of amazing contributors.
110% increase in Daily Active Users (DAU):
- DAU as of Jan 15, 2022: 290,980
- DAU as of March 1, 2024: 679,190
91% User Retention Rate (RR):
- 4 week RR as of Jan 1, 2022: 88.1%
- 4 week RR as of March 1, 2024: 91.1%
The following two KPIs were ones that I took radical accountability for introducing and measuring as part of our design team’s definition of success.
82 System Usability Scale:
- SUS as of March 1, 2023: 80
- SUS as of Jan 1, 2024: 82
x2 design tests a week:
- Est. time to complete UXR in 2021: 8 weeks
- Est. time to complete UXR in 2024: 4 hrs for a first click test and 1 week for a usability test
I began measuring how many times we were connecting with users to ensure we had a strong business case to keep our UserTesting.com licenses each year. As we introduced more ways to conduct design research, I started sharing these numbers for impact and accountability in monthly cross-functional showcases.

Resources I created as team manager, e.g. onboarding guides, career conversation worksheets, and performance rubrics.

A product manager walks away, grinning ear-to-ear and I feel myself swell up with pride.

This person just told an amazing, user-centered story in under two minutes. Before we moved on to the next group’s presentation, with about 25 of us crowded in a room that was covered in an explosion of post-its, markers, and sketch pads, I excitedly started going off about what a perfect example this PM’s story was for our goal. I pointed out how well he distilled complexity of his group’s ideas with conciseness, a storytelling arc, and got us excited about a potential impact we could have on their main character’s life. He told me later that this was one of the first times he felt he genuinely learned something from a brainstorm—not just coming up with ideas, but feeling like taking the time away from his busy day mattered to make him better.

This workshop took three hours during one of our quarterly on-sites in Boston—when the remote team members would all sync our travel to be in the HQ office at the same time for quarterly planning. After breaking up the room into groups of 3-8 people, everyone tackles a challenge as a timed exercise before we come back together as a group and go through everyone’s ideas.

I started running these workshops as a senior designer when I saw room to push our creative confidence in front of the whiteboard. As my role grew, it became an exciting expectation that we would always spend a couple hours a quarter to take a step away from our daily grind to speculate wild futures, retrospect on hardships, experiment with a new skill or consider new ways of working.

“I always look forward to my meetings and workshops with Beth.

She is a powerhouse within user experience and always brings a fresh perspective around how to solve a particular problem. She is a kind and uplifting force when a project may feel stuck. Beth does a great job of proposing options and ideas for finding the best solution for the member at whoop. Her thoughtful presentations during onsites around member interviewing, creating stories, and identifying member journeys are always so appreciated and she truly is always helping those around her learn more by being able to work with her. She is always willing to take the time to explain her thought process or the reasons behind decisions, and is always doing it with such a positive attitude and outlook!”

— Emily Smith, Product Manager for Sleep & Recovery

Before WHOOP, I worked at large companies where I could pull from established design practices. This was especially the case when facilitating design thinking workshops. When I ran a workshop at IBM, their collaborative approach was ingrained in the working environment long before I was trained on their take of the design thinking methodology. Almost everyone in the room was familiar with the activities and structure of a workshop. This had its advantage of not needing to explain why we were doing things this way, yet this also meant if you broke away from the standard activity list, you had eyebrows raised at you for doing it “the wrong way!”

Coming to WHOOP, I embraced the creative freedom of pulling together teams in new ways. Folks certainly did not lack creativity before I started running workshops, but I saw patterns of complaints around teams lacking focus, feeling like their ideas brought up weren’t getting actioned, and quieter voices feeling like they couldn’t get a word in. I see workshops as a way to invite structure to how we collaborate to alleviate these very common sentiments.

Pushback that I got was that I was sometimes too structured, and I needed to invite more flexibility and nimbleness.

I loved moments where we could not only hone how we worked, but that I could continue to develop as a facilitator. I brought in feedback requests after every group session, and especially for our quarterly onsite weeks, each quarter a group of team managers and I experimented with adapting our schedules to the feedback. All in all, I easily facilitated over 30 workshops with a huge percentage of the company’s workforce, with teams such as Software, Performance Science, Strategic Finance, Marketing, Business Partnerships, and more.

Create with new voices.
Laugh about wild futures.
Think big, think wide.
Generate pride & excitement.
Build creative confidence.

For companies that haven’t yet grasped the value of consistently staying in touch with their user base, a user researcher’s day job can feel a lot like a never ending swim upstream. 🐟

While WHOOP had embraced the need for continuous learning with weekly rotation calls between PMs and WHOOP members, we were not inherently better off with how we supported the user researcher function. After losing our third UXR in less than a year, our leadership put a hold on hiring any more researchers. It wasn’t just UXRs though, we were in a hiring freeze across most of the company and were in need of radical focus to keep our reduced team on productive tracks.

This wasn’t the first time I supported a team with no expert UXR specialists, nor was it my first rodeo at emphasizing the importance of user insights in decision-making processes. I’ve felt the liberation before of when we can break away from opinion-based decision-making to true evidence-based decision-making, and I knew this was a worthy fight to better the business. The teams where we’ve had the most confidence in our designs always have dedicated UXRs. Yet still, I would rather take on the weight of conducting user research first hand rather than see us innovate without a collective understanding of user needs and behaviors.

However, this wasn’t just a matter of getting UXR into the roadmap—this was a matter of inspiring every decision maker in the creative process to feel a sense of ownership and personal interest in hearing what users think and do with our product. In past jobs, I followed a pattern of “DIY” methods to demonstrate ROI of UXR before making a case to hire for the role. This time, I took a longer road of building skills and processes to ensure the UXR function could restart without needing to also get buy-in for every project to do their best work. I wanted our next UXR to join a team that matched their excitement for the work that they do.

Here’s the road I took to make continuous learning a habit at WHOOP.

Introduce the tools to DIY.

I started by making more UXR tools and templates available. I bought enterprise licenses for UserTesting and became the go-to person on the team for managing our insights repositories on Dovetail. I built relationships with their solutions engineers to join me in team workshops to learn how to get the most out of the tools.

Recruit a pipeline of users.

Next, I focused on making it easier to access users as soon as you have a question in mind. I sent out email blasts to 5% of our member base to join UserTesting as paid, trusted testers and designed an incentive plan to build engagement. The 921 members who signed up made it possible to cut down our time for recruiting, and could get additional perks for high quality engagement. Using the custom network feature on UserTesting, I enhanced this over time with filterable attributes to make it even easier to connect with people who shared needs with scoped projects.

Lead by example.

I didn’t stop here. I would be the first in a new study to conduct interviews, inviting observers who could learn by seeing how I interacted with people for quality data collection. My team added a lot of sophistication here, including one designer who introduced watch parties to speed up analysis after sessions were complete.

Share out often, in a way that builds excitement.

We could do great work, but is it that great if we kept it all to ourselves? At this point, conducting research was becoming a weekly activity for designers and PMs. In order to make this more known outside of those involved, we began sharing short stories in company-wide all hands, monthly User Feedback showcases and executive reviews. I found that we got the best response when we created highlight reels and ‘commercials’ that hooked people with outrageous quotes to get them to click into the full report.

Mentor & scale our training tactics.

The best advice I ever received was to “make copies of myself” through mentoring and establishing champions to carry ideas forward. Sometimes this meant spending time 1:1 with a PM to redline their interview plan, sit in on their calls and give feedback on their facilitation. Sometimes this looked like leading a 90-minute bootcamp for 100 people on how to reduce bias when talking to users. But it required a constant ear on where team members were struggling, and adapting to improve ourselves.

“You can make people loyal through dark patterns that trap them into retention cycles. You could also teach them to survive without your product, and they’ll remember you forever.”

This spin on the “teach a man to fish” metaphor was shared during an interview with a prospective senior designer. Unfortunately, she didn’t choose us after getting a landslide approval from our interview panel to join our team, but I’ll never forget how great her interview cycle was. I conducted over 100 interviews in my time as a hiring manager, and in that time I created an abundance of new resources to help scale our team with focus and structure.

The last hiring cycle I led with the team introduced a new distinction into our Designer role: placing more emphasis on critical thinking and human-centered practices with UX Designers. Up until then, we titled all on the team as generalist “Product Designers” and only differentiated when someone was a UX Writer or a User Researcher.

After assessing skill gaps early in 2023, I pitched a hiring and career development plan that highlighted an imbalance on our team—our team was highly capable at visual design, yet only a few could go deep in UX methodologies to make the user’s journey as smooth, intuitive and enjoyable as possible. This dynamic created an obsession with how things look over how they work—leading to lots of time wasted reviewing design interactions that lacked productive focus. To prepare our interview panel for a more focused assessment on this skill depth, I took learnings from when I worked on talent acquisition technology at IBM and created a range of new resources for the team.

“I think it is incredibly evident how much Beth cares about what goes into hiring for her team.

We have put a ton of time this past year into making changes and edits to our processes and how we think about interviewing, evaluating, and hiring and it is quite clear how much thought Beth puts into even some of the smaller adjustments. Beth has had no shortage of helpful resources in the form of: figma files, presentation examples, and even a book at one point. As someone who values learning a lot about the disciplines that they hire for, this is something that is really valuable in a cross functional partner/hiring manager. Not only does it help give shape to how I think about hiring in this discipline, but also provides space for discussion on how we plan to tackle hiring.”

— Mikey Draine, Senior Technical Recruiter

I’ve learned a lot in my leap to people management over showing up solely as a mentor. At first, my promotion being tied with surprise direct reports felt a bit like a betrayal. It took me time to combat the lack of psychological safety that was leftover after major organizational shifts to truly understand what the business needed in its wake of change. Despite these reservations, I quickly discovered this innate drive to protect the wellbeing and balance of those who leaned on me. I had already loved mentoring, teaching, and creating harmony between people at work so they can be more productive—suddenly I got to do this as a part of my day job.

Ultimately, I chose to leave WHOOP in March 2024. While I adore this team and attribute much of my personal growth to this inspiring company, I craved a reset after taking a hard look at lessons learned and what I expect to do differently to serve my next team.

Here’s a snapshot in retrospect:

💡
Too much stakeholder management.

There’s an incredible degree of passion at WHOOP. With this, comes interpersonal conflict. I spent so much of my energy trying to mediate peace between teams, that I didn’t always have time remaining to hold the line on quality design output. When a solution gets compromised to the point of losing integrity, I learned to be prepared to stand up and just say no — this is not acceptable, it’s not good UX work, and we’re not doing it. I know now that I have a bias for empathetic management, yet it’s important to me that I can trust my team to navigate some of their interpersonal challenges so that we can keep a pulse on the overall production to remain proud of where our time is being spent.

💡
Remote flexibility was not favored.

For three years, I was one of a very small percentage of remote workers that were exempt from return to office mandates. Based out of Colorado, I flew into Boston every 4-6 weeks to prioritize in person collaboration. I didn’t want to relocate and sacrifice the home life I was building in CO, which led to constant pressure, hypocritical expectations with my reporting team, and fear of reprisal from my leadership team. I have worked remotely since 2017, yet we made it work because I genuinely loved being in the office. However, I learned the vitality of prioritizing alignment in workplace values at the very start of employment to keep the focus on the work. While I felt valued enough to negotiate compromise on my travel arrangements, I would not choose this dynamic again in favor of consistent workplace expectations for all.

💡
Lacking strong design leadership.

I managed all of our internal, full-time designers, but we also partnered daily with an external design agency on retainer out of Germany. The design agency had been working with WHOOP for over a decade, and they have a close relationship with our CEO. Their visual design prowess led to an inherited obsession with how things look over how they work that I spent much of my time looking to evolve. I’m quite proud of the cultural progress we made to put the “human” back into “human performance” as WHOOP’s core mission, however, I wished that I had more examples in-house of what a strong design leader can do. I navigated many scenarios as a first-time manager with the help of my external mentors, but I felt myself hold back on how I “managed up” the leadership chain out of imposter syndrome.

“Beth has been a great mentor in working with stakeholders. I value her guidance on how to communicate design decisions on difficult projects and advocate for the user. She is always eager to collaborate on work and lend her expertise. On the team level, I really appreciate her organized workshops and processes that help us run smoother. Beth, please keep experimenting and caring.”

— Jena Goldman, Product Designer II reporting directly

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