Work

Work

Work

XenBuild

My role

Founder and chief practitioner

Business problem

Companies lack a holistic picture of their product on which they can make tactical and strategic decisions. Instead, they can only view their product through reductive lenses such as user stories, Jira tickets, or lines of code. The result is redundant work, bad products, and short-term decisions.

Solution

I created a revolutionary visualization format that combines information architecture and mental models, allowing a maximally holistic view of a software product. Originally, this was only a methodology that could be applied in any number of software platforms, such as Figma or Miro, but ultimately I turned it into a dedicated application which has made the process of product modeling much faster and more efficient.

Outcome

The XenBuild methodology has enabled the successful GTM of several products, and the new XenBuild app is in trial with a number of orgs.

See the product

blackmonolith.co/xenbuild

An interface dialed in from intensive use and testing

I have been using XenBuild as a methodology since 2020, and as a product since 2022. I have used it in real-life projects, and conducted trials with users at various government and academic institutions. This has enabled me to design the most effective visual representation of a software product.

It can communicate complex concepts at a glance

One of the most powerful use cases for XenBuild is tracking design and development progress. Normally, this would have to be done with things like Gantt charts, Kanban boards, or line graphs, however all of these oversimplify the complexity of a software project. The small multiples model of XenBuild allows the user to see where progress is occurring and where it isn't, across any number of variables.

Its flexibility lets it adapt to any project

Whether it is being used to track development on a new product or visualize a site's traffic, XenBuild's format is adaptable due to its universal nature. My work in information architecture and data visualization over the past two decades have culminated in XenBuild.