In 2022, I joined Yelp as Director of Product Design overseeing the iterative design of the Consumer Experience.
My Team / My Role / Product Enhancements / 6-Star Design / Retrospective
My Team
Providing mentorship, guidance and direction to 3 design managers and 14 individual contributor product designers, I led this team in achieving excellence and impact across user engagement, content contributions, and audience growth initiatives.
My Role
As Director of Product Design, I played a key role in shaping product direction and team development through the following activities:
Collaborated closely with the VP of Product and VP of Engineering to define strategic roadmaps and lead cross-functional annual planning.
Conducted weekly one-on-one sessions with team members, offering personalized guidance, mentorship, and design coaching.
Organized and led monthly design team meetings, quarterly product all-hands, Q&A’s, executive-level reporting, and cross-functional planning and ideation workshops.
Facilitated weekly design reviews, providing actionable “consider” or “blocking” feedback for designers and product managers.
Supported career development by setting goals with design managers and individual contributors, calibrating bi-annually to align with career levels within the design organization.
Engaged in cross-functional collaboration with product, engineering, and marketing managers to ensure alignment on directives, strategies, and outcomes.
“I’ve especially appreciated his clear, actionable feedback and support on challenging projects. Tony’s blend of trust, guidance, and autonomy has been both inspiring and instrumental in my growth”
PRODUCT ENHANCEMENTS
I managed the design of product enhancements and optimizations that contributed to Yelp’s record net revenue of $1.33 billion in 2023, up from $1.19 billion the previous year.
These enhancements & optimizations included:
Enhanced Search Experience Powered by LLMs and AI
This update harnesses large language models (LLMs) to analyze Yelp’s extensive user-generated content, delivering concise summaries of business insights directly within search results. By understanding search intent, the enhanced search experience offers personalized recommendations, making it easier for users to discover relevant businesses.
AI-powered Business Summaries
These AI-driven summaries use LLMs to analyze recent reviews, providing users with a quick, insightful description of what to expect at each business. This feature helps users easily identify businesses that best match their needs at a glance.
Interactive Review Topics
To ease writer’s block during review drafting, we introduced interactive review topics that guide users through key areas to cover. This feature helps users track what they’ve mentioned and suggests additional topics they might want to address, making reviews more comprehensive, engaging and easier to write.
Updated Reactions
Over 15 years, Yelp’s reactions—“Useful,” “Funny,” and “Cool”—became iconic, but users increasingly felt they needed more ways to express their sentiments about reviews. In response, my team and I led an iterative process of research, testing, and refinement to develop a new set of reactions: “Helpful,” “Thanks,” “Love This,” and “Oh No.” These options provide a more nuanced way for users to engage with reviews. Following this update, Yelp saw a 10x increase in reactions, signalling a stronger connection between user intent and reaction choices.
Design credit: Patrick Riggs, Motion Designer
Design credit: Patrick Riggs, Motion Designer
AI Stitched Videos
Led by the Contributions design team, we developed an AI-powered framework to create short, narrated videos that highlight local businesses. These videos seamlessly stitch together user-generated photos, videos, and text descriptions already shared on Yelp. To maintain authenticity and align with Yelp's brand values, each piece of content is attributed to its original contributor, ensuring the final product feels genuine and community-driven.
“Tony is a force of nature — an insightful designer, a fountain of ideas, and a committed champion for innovation and change. He had made a huge impact on our product and especially our innovation process and approach. I’d gladly work with Tony again.”
6 Star Design
At the outset of 2023, I secured buy-in for a 6-Star Design Innovation Group, spearheading Yelp’s first ever initiative focused on prototyping and validating horizon 3 product investments.
McKinsey's Three Horizons of Growth framework is a tool that helps businesses balance short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals to achieve sustained growth. The framework is made up of three horizons, each with a different focus:
Horizon 1
Focuses on the company's core businesses, which are the products and brands that generate the most profit. The goal is to improve performance to maximize the value of these businesses.
Horizon 2
Focuses on emerging businesses or products that are still in their early stages. These businesses are likely to generate substantial profits in the future, but they may require significant investment.
Horizon 3
Focuses on ideas for future business, such as research projects, pilot programs, or minority stakes in new businesses. These are long-term goals that involve groundbreaking innovations and new market explorations.
At Yelp
While Yelp had honed its optimization strategies for Horizon 1 and 2 product investments, there was a notable gap in addressing longer-term, higher-risk Horizon 3 opportunities. Without a robust validation methodology to build confidence around these investments, executives were hesitant to pursue them, creating a potential risk for the company in adapting to evolving user behaviours and competitive threats.
Introducing 6-Star Design
At the start of 2023, I proposed a design-led initiative to product leadership aimed at researching, ideating, prototyping, and user-testing Horizon 3 possibilities. After securing buy-in, I assembled a tiger team to dedicate focused effort to this initiative. The program established a framework for delivering validated Horizon 3 concepts on a quarterly basis, shaping product roadmaps and sequencing experiments along a clear path towards more ambitious visionary goals.
6-Star Design Framework
While I’ve since moved on from Yelp, the 6-Star program has continued under new leadership and has become a foundational element of Yelp’s product culture and ecosystem.
“Tony’s charisma fosters a strong sense of cohesion within the team, making everyone feel seen, heard, and valued.”
Retrospective
During my time at Yelp, I had the privilege of shaping impactful design strategies that aligned innovation with measurable business results. From leading the design teams for Yelp’s consumer experience to spearheading the 6-Star Horizon 3 initiative, my work focused on challenging the status quo, fostering creativity, and aligning bold ideas with user needs and business goals. These efforts not only contributed to record-setting revenue growth but also left a lasting imprint on Yelp’s product culture with 6-Star design.
The experience also provided invaluable learning opportunities. I developed a deeper understanding of product growth by collaborating with some of the best product managers in the industry and matured my leadership skills through partnerships with Yelp’s top leaders. I honed my mentorship and coaching abilities by leading some of the most talented UX designers I’ve had the privilege to work with. Additionally, I gained a nuanced understanding of the local business market and their unique needs, while also learning strategies for growing and retaining large user bases through product growth strategies.
These lessons deepened my expertise in balancing long-term vision with actionable short-term strategies, leveraging data to inform design decisions, and navigating the complexities of user growth and retention. They also underscored the value of mentorship, collaboration with top-tier talent, and understanding the unique needs of local businesses, users and reviewers to craft product experiences that drive real-business impact.
Thank you to all my former colleagues at Yelp for making my time there such a valuable and rewarding experience.
“I’ve seen such an array of design leader archetypes over the years. Tony is my favorite type. He’s a visionary. ”