Overview
ADPList is a mentorship platform, a community of 9,700+ mentors across 60+ countries where you book time with a mentor, you talk, you leave. Mayumi Adati and I both mentor there, and we kept hitting the same wall: the conversations were great, but nothing actually got made. Five months later we had a working prototype. Constraint: a self-initiated concept — noticed by ADPList's founders, never shipped.
My role
Co-designer with Mayumi Adati. We shared the research, framing, and ideation; I worked across UX and UI. It was a genuine two-person collaboration, the same kind of hands-on project the feature itself is meant to enable.
The problem
The gap sat on both sides of the call:
- Mentees couldn't apply the advice. You talk to your mentor, and then you're on your own to actually do the thing. The guidance rarely turned into work.
- Mentors wanted to be hands-on. Reacting to a finished piece is easy; helping someone make it is where the value is, and there was no way to do that.
- Resource overload. Learning material is scattered across a dozen platforms, and just choosing where to start is its own paralysis (Hick's law, if you want the label).
- Underneath all of it, people needed a framework for building case studies, portfolios, and real work experience, not another pile of links.
The question
How might we help mentors and mentees work on real projects together, with the guidance and resources built in?
What we designed
A projects feature that turns a mentorship into a build:
- A mentee starts a project, with AI-generated prompts to get past the blank page.
- Mentees and mentors collaborate on it together, not one-directionally.
- Step-by-step guidance and templates carry the work forward.
- The project documents itself into a case study as you go.
- A community forum for peer review and visibility.
- A shareable link, so the finished project drops straight into a portfolio.
Try it
Four flows across both sides of the platform, live Figma prototypes. Click through them here, or open any one full screen.
How we worked
Five months, in the open: meet → research → ideate → prototype. Our first idea was design jams, live group sessions, and we killed it: it didn't scale, and it leaned on everyone being online at once. The unlock was noticing that the way we were working, two people, a shared brief, guidance passing back and forth, was the product. So we built that.
Where it could go
We scoped it for design, but the framework isn't design-specific, the same start a project → guidance → case study loop extends to product management, marketing, or engineering, and could flex toward sprint- or agile-style formats. The sky's the limit, as we put it at the time.
Where it landed
It's a concept, not a shipped feature, but we put it into the world and it landed.
- Mayumi's write-up of the project
- The LinkedIn post where I shared the work, it caught the attention of ADPList's founders and core users on the platform