Shaping product vision and onboarding at Consent Kit

The project

A platform built by a researcher, for researchers

Consent Kit is a research operations platform that helps user research teams manage participants efficiently, ethically, and at scale. Built by a researcher for researchers, it supports the full participant lifecycle: recruitment, consent, scheduling, data governance, and panel management. Customers include the BBC, Nielsen Norman Group, Co-op, and UK government departments.

I worked directly with the founder to clarify the product vision, define the strategic direction, and redesign the customer onboarding workflows that would determine whether new teams actually adopted the platform or abandoned it.

The challenge

Growing beyond a consent tool

The product had strong core functionality and a loyal customer base, but was growing beyond its original scope. What started as a consent management tool was becoming a full participant management platform, and the product vision, positioning, and onboarding experience had not kept pace with that evolution.

• New customers arrived with different mental models. Some saw a consent tool, others a panel manager, others a research CRM.
• Onboarding had to bridge those entry points and demonstrate value quickly, regardless of where a team was starting from.
• The strategy needed clarity: what Consent Kit was, what it was not, and where it was heading.

What we did

Product strategy and experience as one system

I worked across product strategy, customer experience, and service design, treating the product and the experience around it as parts of the same system.

• Mapped the end-to-end customer journey from first awareness through trial, onboarding, adoption and expansion, identifying where people dropped off, got stuck, or failed to see the value of the platform.
• Clarified the product vision and strategic direction with the founder, moving from consent-focused positioning to a broader participant management platform, defining what the product was becoming, what it was not, and making that evolution legible to the team and the market.
• Redesigned onboarding to reduce friction for new customers, treating onboarding to a research ops platform as organisational change, not just product setup, teams moving from spreadsheets and email threads to a shared system.
• Designed onboarding pathways for different entry points: consent management, panel recruitment, or replacing spreadsheet-based research ops, each reaching its own moment of value quickly.
• Balanced self-serve simplicity with the guided depth research teams need to set up their processes properly, not just their tools.

The outcome

A clear direction and a smoother path to value

The work helped give the product a clear strategic direction and a customer experience that supported the transition from consent tool to full participant management platform.

• A clarified product vision and positioning that the founder and team could use to guide product decisions, prioritise features, and communicate with the market.
• Redesigned onboarding workflows that reduced time to value for new customers, supporting different entry points and use cases without fragmenting the experience.
• Customer journey mapping that made the full experience visible, from first contact through long-term adoption, giving the team a shared reference point for where to invest and where to fix.
• A strategy framework that supported the platform’s evolution from a niche consent tool to its broader proposition today: recruit, prepare, respect.
• Strategic and experience design work that contributed to growth, with customers including the BBC, Nielsen Norman Group, Co-op, TPXimpact, and UK government departments.

Learnings

Reflections from this work

• Onboarding is organisational change, not product setup. When people move from spreadsheets to a shared platform, they are changing how their team works together, the experience has to support that transition, not just show people where the buttons are.
• Product vision has to be legible to the team, not just the founder. Making a founder’s vision explicit, debatable and shared is design work, and some of the most impactful design work you can do for a startup.
• Ethics can be a differentiator, not a constraint. Consent Kit’s commitment to ethical consent, accessibility and data governance is why customers choose it. Designing with ethics at the centre made the product stronger, not more restrictive.