Mentoring marketplace for dentists
Intaglio · Product Designer · 2023
- Scope
- Research, strategy, IA, design system, prototype, testing
- Team
- Me, with the founding team
- Status
- Live at intagl.io
Outcomes
- 1 month
- concept to handoff
- 100+
- mentors onboarded since
- < 2 min
- to book a mentor, in testing
- 1,000+
- early-access requests by month two
Research
Three sessions with the founders, then interviews with a waitlist of mentors and mentees. Young professionals wanted guidance and CPD points; senior ones wanted an easy way to offer availability and run masterclasses.
The founding team were all practising dentists with a shared motivation and a high-level vision, but no one had a product background, and the requirements document had been written without the people who would use it. So the first job was to widen the circle: with the founders' help and a pre-collected waitlist, I interviewed current and emerging professionals who could be mentees or mentors.
What they said: mentorship and structured learning paths that count towards CPD (continuing professional development) points were the main draw; younger dentists wanted guidance through early careers and niche areas; peer-to-peer learning and forums mattered; and the industry leaders who would mentor wanted a simple way to set availability, add masterclass content and support students after a course.
The competitive review showed most platforms prioritise one of community, mentorship or learning. Intaglio's position was all three, with flexible formats (live, recorded, self-paced) and the filtering that makes a resource library usable.
Strategy and MVP
Workshops aligned the founders on a phased plan and a value proposition: personalised mentorship and professional development for dental professionals, with live masterclasses, CPD tracking and a community in one place.
A series of workshops, presentations and surveys aligned the stakeholders on the competitive landscape, the product and its vision, then on what belonged in the MVP and what could wait. The MVP: mentorship booking, masterclass registration, webinars, and availability and course creation by mentors, with class types limited to live. After it: CPD tracking, certificates, post-course support, forums, flexible class types and community tools.
Design
Information architecture, a design system on shadcn, and full mentee and mentor experiences: profiles, booking, masterclasses, sessions and billing.
Search is the spine of the platform: mentors, masterclasses and webinars all hang off it, with filters for topic, mentor, duration, format and price. The design system started from shadcn with Intaglio's palette, so the founders' engineers could build quickly.
Mentees get a dashboard with bookings, their inner circle of mentors, courses and billing; mentors get the same shell with services, earnings and booking requests. Every mentor has a profile with expertise by years, services, masterclasses and reviews, and a Book a Session action that is never more than one tap away.
Results
In testing, two of three users understood the proposition within twenty seconds, booking a mentor took under two minutes, and registering for a masterclass about 45 seconds. Early access drew over a thousand requests by the second month of alpha.
The platform has since onboarded more than a hundred mentors globally, in a dental-education market worth around £285M. Some details in this study are adjusted or withheld for client privacy.