Your product designer & go-to-market team in one.

Hi, I'm Derek! 👋

I’m a product designer, storyteller, and lifelong student of what makes people tick. I have 10 years of experience across design, growth, and product marketing and care about creating products that drive value and websites that tell their unique stories.

I formerly led product growth at
Lattice, focusing on user activation and retention. Before then, I was a product marketer in charge of building and launching features, running campaigns, and leading Lattice's customer marketing through the company's growth from $4M to over $100M.

Headshot of Derek Embry
KIND WORDS
Headshot of Jill Crawford.
JILL CRAWFORD

VP, Marketing

When I first interviewed Derek, I recall thinking, “Wow, this human is impressive” And goodness was I right! His journey at Lattice is deep and vast and he continues to push the envelope and find ways to immerse himself in the business and the product. Derek is the kind of person who truly believes in core values and pushes himself to work cross functionally, explore efficiencies, and find ways to make any initiative work with minimal resources. On top of it all, he is an expert-level relationship builder and has earned the trust and respect of all Latticians.
Headshot of Melissa Chenok.
MELISSA CHENOK

Group Product Manager

Throughout our time working together, Derek has consistently demonstrated expertise in various areas crucial to driving product growth and success. Derek's deep understanding of product-led growth, growth strategy, product storytelling, product marketing, user behavior leveraging data, and experimentation is remarkable. Derek's mentorship has played a pivotal role in my professional growth, particularly in the areas of product-led growth and experimentation. His passion, expertise, and dedication make him an exceptional asset to any organization. With his analytical prowess, strategic mindset, and strong grasp of user behavior leveraging data, Derek consistently delivers outstanding results and contributes to the overall success of the team.
Headshot of Jonathan Day.
Jonathan Day

Co-Founder, VetScribe

I cannot say enough good things about working with Derek. From our first interaction, I was immediately impressed with Derek's deep understanding of the problem space & bias to action, but where he really stood out was his ability to put together elegant solutions that addressed the root cause of these problems. When partnering with Derek on these projects, there were often times where I felt completely comfortable having him execute without any intervention, which enabled us to move faster and ship more high quality experiences. On top of that, Derek always acted as an owner - if there was a roadblock, he found a way to move the team forward regardless of the challenge. He's an absolute Growth powerhouse - if you have an opportunity to hire or work with Derek, you will not be disappointed.

Give users a soft landing on their first login.

GROWTH DESIGN
UX DESIGN
PROTOTYPING
EXPERIMENTATION

ROLES

‍Product Designer
Product Manager
Product Marketer

TIMELINE

2 months

Screen 1 of the onboarding flow.

TL;DR

Designed & built in-app onboarding from 0 to 1 for new Lattice users to quickly understand tools and get started.

User retention was the single most predictive measure of a customer’s likelihood to renew with Lattice, but only ⅓ of users regularly used its tools. I designed and built an new user onboarding flow that drove a small but statistically significant 2% lift in user activation in the first 4 weeks through a 50-50 split test. This met the criteria for a successful experiment, so I launched the onboarding flow to all users and prepared for V2.

PROBLEM

User engagement stalled, customers were churning at an alarming rate, and our NDR was dropping.

Lattice is a wide-reaching HR platform with many tools, but one of the most common pieces of feedback is that users don’t know where to start. Typically, we relied on the HR team (our primary buyer and decision maker) to onboard their company, but it required a tremendous amount of in-person training from our implementation team in the hopes that the HR team could become the teachers for their company.
⚠️ Constraints
While leadership did allow me to create my role and start the Growth function, they were not ready yet to divert engineering resources from building new features on our roadmap. As a tradeoff, I designed, built, and launched the onboarding flow myself using third-party software which had design limitations in exchange for speed and ease of implementation.

SOLUTION

Create an onboarding flow for new users and run an experiment to boost user activation.

Final: This version of the onboarding flow was shown to individual contributors – users who were admins (HR team) or managers with direct reports. Those users received a similar onboarding flow with different, more relevant content.

OUTCOME & LEARNING

A successful first iteration with room for improvement.

As Lattice’s first full user base A/B test, the new user onboarding experiment taught us a lot. First, it became clear how difficult running successful experiments in a B2B environment is. A B2C company might run experiments that target a fraction of their user base that could still include upwards of a million users and only need a week to reach statistical significance.

Since B2B companies onboard users much more slowly, Lattice’s experiment group was less than 10,000 users, so reaching statistical significance was a positive signal that we could continue experiments like this to improve the product.

Even so, a 2% lift was smaller than we’d hoped to achieve. It was clear that changing user behavior would be challenging, especially within the constraints from our EPD team, but it was a foundation that we’d continue to build on.

UPDATES FOR V2

Embrace less-is-more and reduce cognitive load.

Everyone hopes that the first version of a new feature is perfect and we never have to revisit it. Of course, that's wishful thinking, especially for a zero-to-one feature. There are many things I would have liked to improve on the next version for onboarding, including:

1. Decide on one primary metric and action.
For this project, I worked with Data Science to determine that successful user activation meant the user completed at least one of three key actions, depending on the tools that their company prioritized. I assumed giving users more flexible choices would be better, but it likely created more confusion. In the next version, I would test a flow that prioritized one core action to make it extremely clear what the user should do vs. what the user could do.
   
2. Provide some basic explanation of the tools.
In an effort to keep the onboarding flow quick and to the point, I assumed the actions I was highlighting to new users would be familiar enough in the broader context. Of course, nothing is that simple. In the next version, I would test adding messaging around, for example, what Lattice 1:1s does and why using it is valuable from the get-go.

3. Apply cleaner design with in-house code.
Being constrained by a third-party tool meant that I could only do so much to make the design clean and on-brand. In the next version, I’d spend more time working with other EPD team members to clean up the design more and, if resources allowed, creating the flow in-house so we could unlock a more creative and engaging UX.

Redesign how users seek help and solve problems without leaving Lattice.

GROWTH DESIGN
UX DESIGN
PROTOTYPING
EXPERIMENTATION

ROLES

‍Product Designer
Product Manager
Product Marketer

TIMELINE

2 months

DESIGN PARTNER

Johanna Weintraub

A screenshot of the help menu in its open state showing the menu options for users.
TL;DR

Give Lattice users more self-service options to learn, saving time and money in the process.

The new Help Menu introduced several new ways for Lattice users to learn how to use Lattice with interactive in-app guidance, help articles, new feature announcements, and more without needing to contact chat support.
PROBLEM

With so many new features, Lattice was becoming overwhelming and user engagement was declining.

Lattice experienced an issue that many B2B software companies faced after hypergrowth - declining user engagement and customer retention. It’s a complex problem with many factors, but one was clear: as we had added more features, the platform grew more complex and difficult to understand.

Users had a couple of options to solve this problem: contact customer support to get instruction, or simply stop using Lattice unless they had to. Unfortunately, neither of those user behaviors were healthy for Lattice’s business, so we had an opportunity to create something new.
SOLUTION

Completely revamp how Lattice users find information about features and get help in-app.

A snapshot of the wireframing stage for the Help Menu project.

Wireframes: Taking inspiration from help menus from tools like Asana, Notion, and Loom, I put together concepts for what the menu might look like in Lattice taking into consideration the different areas of the app where help is already offered.

Final: Ultimately I landed on the bottom-right corner because we had already established a user behavior for seeking help with the in-app chat support that we could build on.

OUTCOME & LEARNING

Meet users where they are and how they want to learn.

Users reported that it was much easier to learn Lattice, the customer experience team reported lower volumes of basic questions. Even the Design team appreciated that the new help icon took up much less space on pages.

Looking at the usage data for each of the modules, we learned that users were accessing non-chat resources about 30% of the time. This still meant that users were going to the help menu often to chat with support, but it gave us the opportunity to experiment with new kinds of guidance going forward.

Make Lattice implementation easy with on-demand video courses for all users.

UX DESIGN
PROTOTYPING
WEB DESIGN
PRODUCT MARKETING

ROLES

Web Designer
Product Manager
Product Marketer

TIMELINE

4 months

DESIGN PARTNER

Luc Chaissac

The home page of Lattice University showing 3 categories for videos: admin, manager, and employee.
TL;DR

Create a hub for Lattice product education.

We built Lattice University to give all Lattice users access to a library of product videos to teach them how to use all of Lattice’s tools. We also built the Change Management Hub, a connected arm of Lattice University, that housed training PDFs, slide deck templates, and email templates all aimed at platform admins (the HR team) to help them introduce Lattice to their company.
PROBLEM

Learning how to use Lattice is time consuming and difficult.

Early in my time at Lattice while it was still a young company, we were dealing with a company adoption challenge: HR admins were having a hard time explaining how Lattice worked to all the employees at their company. After a long buying journey, our team was handing the responsibility to the HR admins to do even more work to onboard everyone (executives, managers, and individual contributors), which was incredibly time-consuming and often just led to more questions.
SOLUTION

Founded Lattice University and the Change Management Hub (CMH).

A snapshot of the wireframing stage for lattice university.

Lattice U. Wireframes: I studied the way many other successful companies created product education hubs similar to what we envisioned. Drawing inspiration from companies like Webflow, Shopify, and Hubspot, I created several layout concepts depending on how we wanted users to discover and find content.

A snapshot of the wireframing stage for Lattice University.

CMH Wireframes: Many fewer companies have an internal resource for change management so I didn't have as strong a benchmark to refer to for the CMH. Even so, I sketched and wireframed concepts for different layouts depending on the content we wanted to prioritize for users.

Final Lattice U: We used Webflow to build Lattice University from scratch rather than a third-party platform which allowed us to match the look and feel to Lattice's brand without making many concessions. The final product felt very much like Lattice even though it was built in a completely separate platform.

OUTCOME & LEARNING

Making it easy to learn the tool is a competitive differentiator.

Lattice University and the Change Management Hub were the first major improvement to the way Lattice welcomed new customers to the platform. With Lattice University and the CMH, we took a huge burden off of our customers’ and our own team’s shoulders during implementation. The vast majority of basic product training could now be done asynchronously with videos and other educational materials with minimal time investment.

As it turns out, not only were Lattice University and the CMH such a success in helping to make customer implementations more effective, they were also helpful in closing new enterprise customer deals. Soon after launching, the sales team started including them as product features in the sales process since our competitors didn't offer the same support. We even built marketing pages for Lattice University and the Change Management Hub to show just how important they were to the Lattice product suite!
FOUNDER OF YOUDREAMING
Making lucid dreaming a part of a healthy, balanced life.

ROLES

Founder & COO

BRAND PARTNER

Luc Chaissac

ARTIST PARTNER

Wenyi Geng

A screenshot of the waitlist page for You Dreaming while we were building the company.
TL;DR

People are in a crisis of poor sleep. Let's fix that!

Along with two co-founders, I started YouDreaming, a CPG company offering a natural, evidence-based solution for healthy sleep hygiene and awesome dreams through lucid dreaming. We created a training program based in cognitive behavioral therapy designed to teach your mind to lucid dream and, in the process, enjoy healthier and more fulfilling sleep.

Studies show that proper sleep health is associated with countless positive health effects, like promoting cardiovascular health, reducing the risk of Alzheimer's disease, and psychological wellness. We believe that dreaming should be a core part of a healthy life and offered a traditional organic supplement combined with an evidence based dream journal to track your dream adventures. Through dreaming, we can live a more healthy, exciting and widening world of endless possibility.
BRAND

Make lucid dreaming more interesting and exciting than binging a tv show.

There are already a plethora of companies aimed at solving the crisis of poor sleep, whether through tedious bio tracking or medical sleep aids, but none effectively solve the underlying problem: sleep is often seen as just another thing to be optimized. We saw this as an opportunity to take a different approach.

By teaching people how to access the infinite possibilities of their imagination and create wondrous dream worlds of their own, sleep could be something that people will actually look forward to at night.

Bedtime Story: As part of YouDreaming's launch strategy, we wrote an adult bedtime story to illustrate and narrate how lucid dream training works. Here are some of my favorite pieces of artwork from the inimitable artist we partnered with, Wenyi Geng.

PRODUCT

Training program & herbal supplement to promote restful sleep and vivid dreaming.

The bottle label for the YouDreaming supplement.The YouDreaming herbal supplement product.

Supplement Label: I designed this brand label featuring the Star, the protagonist's teacher in the bedtime story, as our primary brand asset. Here it is in real life!

AFTERMATH

Learning good lessons the hard way.

There were a lot of lessons in founding a company through this experience. One of the hardest lessons learned was how much pressure creating a company and bringing a product to market put on one's mental health. In this case, for one of our co-founders, it proved to be too much. Long story short, we were forced to close the company just months before we were going to open the online store. It was a devastating turn of events that has reinforced just how important co-founder relationships are and one's mental health when trying to start a business.

SLINGING SPELLS IN MAGIC: THE GATHERING
Become a champion of Casual Commander and memorable games.
TL;DR

I'm a nerd and not afraid to show it.

Magic: The Gathering is a wonderful game and I've been playing it since around 2001. I primarily play casual Commander and love brewing creative and (sometimes) high-powered decks. I love the challenge and would much rather have a fun, memorable game than win.

But why talk about this silly game in my design portfolio?

Well, it turns out that building a deck actually has a lot in common with the design process. Let me break it down for you.
PROBLEM

How do I win the game in a way that is both creative and fun for every player at the table?

As with any hobby, a lot of people take it really seriously where winning is the end goal. I'm not one of those kinds of players.

It would be easy to make a deck that wins often. What's not easy is making a deck that hits the trifecta of being effective, personally unique, and is fun for everyone else, too. In a game, your audience is more than just you.
RESEARCH

Gather inspiration and borrow like an artist (designer).

There are over 25,000 cards printed in Magic. The near endless possibility is what made Magic one of the most successful games in history. Players have a tremendous amount of space for creativity and self-expression, but building a deck from scratch can be quite overwhelming. Like a product, to make a great deck, research is key.

My research process typically starts with a card that draws my attention for its uniqueness or potential for fun. From there, I pore through the lists of other deckbuilders to see how they approached the strategy and uncover patterns. Do the patterns seem effective? Are they clever and creative? But most importantly, would the strategy be fun?

I gather the components that seem exciting and then start adding my personal approach. I tend to prefer strategies that take a little longer to develop, but lead to surprising and dramatic results.
BUILD, TEST, ITERATE

A/B testing in a card game? Of course!

The first version of any deck is rarely perfect. I usually go through several versions of a deck before it sees even its first game. I'm a big fan of goldfishing – playing against myself – as a way to test. Essentially, QA.

Once the deck feels good in my hands, it's time for the real test: actual games! I'm always excited to see how it performs in the real world and what I might learn.

A deck – like a product – is never truly finished, either. And with new cards coming out all the time, there are always things to improve on and adapt to meet the goals of function, creativity, and fun. At the end of the day, the constant cycle of brainstorming and experimenting is what makes this game so enjoyable.
A picture of Atla Palani, one of my favorite Magic: The Gathering Commanders.
A picture of Isshin, Two Heavens as One, one of my favorite Magic: The Gathering Commanders.
A picture of Seton, Krosan Protector, one of my favorite Magic: The Gathering Commanders.

Snapshot: Just a few of my personal favorite decks that I've brewed over the years. Of course, there's plenty more where those came from. For those interested, you can find all my lists on Moxfield. 🧙