Caitlin Steele

Caitlin Steele

Caitlin Steele helps startups and growth-stage SaaS companies untangle product chaos through Object-Oriented UX and narrative futures thinking, drawing on years leading design on products such as MasterClass, Trello, Confluence and lululemon.

Fire Weather: On why tech’s worst-rated managers are not the problem — A fire tanker aircraft releases a massive cloud of bright red fire retardant against a brilliant blue sky during aerial firefighting operations [@tfoxfoto/iStock].

Fire Weather: On why tech’s worst-rated managers are not the problem

This week, more than 330,000 people have been driven from their homes by wildfires burning across France and Spain. France has already recorded more than three times its annual number of fires, and its soil moisture is the lowest ever measured this early in the summer. Near Bordeaux, crews

Caitlin Steele

AI Made Building Cheap, but It Made Clarity Expensive — Elfa Closet system by the Container Store. It makes sense if you to read the article, I promise.

AI Made Building Cheap, but It Made Clarity Expensive

Why SaaS design needs Object-Oriented UX The Bottleneck Moved Designers are building direct to code now. Cool. Engineers are designing. Cool, cool. Product managers are making 50-page PRDs, and dumping them in Claude Code. Cool, cool, cool. Everyone is a unicorn now. Describe a screen to an AI

Caitlin Steele

Tolerance-Informed Futures — Map of Edinburgh (capital city of Scotland) in the 17th century. This was not long before the city began one of Europe's first urban planning projects by designing New Town.

Tolerance-Informed Futures

On Prototyping the Conditions and Why Clarity is the Deliverable In May 2026, I sat in a room outside Amsterdam at the Hatch Leadership Atelier and listened to Giulio Frigieri give a talk called Prototyping the Conditions: Design as Governance. I had hypotheses going in and I left with confirmation

Caitlin Steele

Transit Lines & Touchpoints: A Mobile Design Strategy Case Study

Transit Lines & Touchpoints: A Mobile Design Strategy Case Study

This is a summary of a talk I gave about Trello in 2025 at SwiftCraft as an opening keynote, at iOSKonf in North Macedonia, and at Pragma Conf in Bologna. At UX Scotland 2026, I delivered it to designers for the first time as Transit Lines & Touchpoints: A Narrative Framework for Multi-Device UX.

Caitlin Steele

Caitlin Steele • Conferences

UX Scotland: Transit Lines & Touchpoints — Conference talk delivered at UX Scotland in June, 2026

UX Scotland: Transit Lines & Touchpoints

What if your mobile team's problem is a lack of clarity, not speed? Full Case Study is now up here. When I took over design for Trello's mobile org at Atlassian, the team was struggling. We delivered 35% of the monthly active users, 33% of all

Caitlin Steele

Caitlin Steele • Conferences

Designing Buildable Apps

Designing Buildable Apps

This blog post introduces the core concept of “Designing Buildable Apps” and previews the insights shared by Caitlin Steele and Jeff Watkins at SwiftCraft 2024. Introduction to the SwiftCraft 2024 Presentation Have you ever been handed a beautiful app design that was nearly impossible to implement? Or you’ve designed

Caitlin Steele

Caitlin Steele • Conferences