Designing clarity in a complex, regulated marketplace

Role: Chief Product & Design Officer

Overview

My role was to simplify the system at its core: clarify user intent, streamline flows, and make complex industry constraints feel intuitive.

I led the redesign of Vangst’s marketing website and streamlined the marketplace experience, a two-sided platform connecting cannabis companies with talent across temporary and full-time roles.

Operating in a highly regulated, state-by-state industry, the platform had grown quickly to over 100,000 users—but the product experience hadn’t kept pace. Users struggled to navigate workflows, understand requirements, and complete key actions like hiring or applying.

The Problem

The marketplace was doing a lot—but not clearly.

• Employers and candidates were funneled through overlapping, unclear paths

• Key actions like posting a job or applying required too many steps

• Regulatory complexity (state-by-state cannabis laws) created confusion and friction

• The platform lacked a cohesive structure across personas, leading to inconsistent experiences

As a result, users were dropping off in critical flows, and the product struggled to scale effectively with demand.

Opportunity

Reframe the product around a simple idea:

People come to Vangst to do one of two things:
Hire or Get Hired

By aligning the entire experience around this core intent, we could reduce friction, improve conversion, and create a foundation for future growth—including automation and AI.

Approach

1. Re-architect the experience around user intent

I redesigned the website to clearly separate and prioritize two primary journeys:

• For companies: hiring, managing roles, and finding candidates

• For candidates: discovering opportunities and applying seamlessly

This created a more intuitive entry point into the product and reduced cognitive load across the board.

2. Simplify multi-persona workflows

The platform supported multiple roles—recruiters, hiring managers, and job seekers—each with different needs.

I mapped and streamlined these workflows end-to-end, removing unnecessary steps and clarifying transitions between actions.

The result was a system that felt cohesive rather than fragmented.

3. Turn regulatory complexity into a product advantage

Cannabis hiring is uniquely complex due to varying laws by state.

I designed an interactive state-by-state regulatory system that allowed users to:

• Understand hiring requirements instantly

• Explore compliance rules by location

• Make informed decisions without leaving the platform

Instead of being a blocker, compliance became a differentiating feature.

4. Improve conversion through clarity and flow

Across key marketplace actions—job posting, candidate discovery, and applications—I focused on:

• Reducing steps and decision fatigue

• Making next actions obvious

• Creating clearer feedback loops for users

This helped drive more successful outcomes on both sides of the marketplace.

5. Design for what comes next

While improving the current experience, I also helped lay the groundwork for future evolution. This included early thinking around AI-enabled workflows that would later become central to Pikl—an AI-native staffing platform spun out of Vangst.

Impact

• Streamlined core marketplace flows across a 100K+ user platform

• Improved clarity and usability for both employers and candidates

• Increased efficiency in key actions like job posting and applications

• Transformed complex regulatory information into an accessible product feature

• Established the product foundation for the spinout of Pikl, extending the platform into AI-driven staffing

What I Learned

Designing for a regulated marketplace reinforced a core principle in my work:

Complexity isn’t something to hide—it’s something to translate.

By structuring the experience around real user intent and making constraints visible but understandable, we were able to turn friction into clarity—and create a system that could scale.