Infragistics sold developer components. In 2013, they decided to own the design side too. Existing prototyping tools were click-to-navigate, built for websites, not applications. That mattered because incomplete specs create incomplete software: if a state isn't specified, it doesn't get built, or gets built wrong. Teams needed a way to show behavior, not describe it. A prototype an architect could run, jump to a specific state, and immediately surface the gaps, before a line of code was written.

I owned the product: feature prioritization, specification, UX testing, and final sign-off before anything shipped. Team of 10: 7 developers, 2 senior architects, 1 visual designer. Discovery-led throughout: customer scenario audits, competitive prototyping, dogfooding in Studio as it was built, structured customer testing before each release.

Cross-platform desktop app from scratch: Windows and Mac, identical behavior. The technology stack hit performance walls. And desktop apps carry implicit expectations nobody files as feature requests: drag-and-drop, keyboard shortcuts, context menus, IA that just makes sense.

The defining call was making the state chart a live, first-class artifact. As designers added interactions and states, the chart built itself, no separate diagram to maintain. The model was the design. For v1, I ruled out cloud sharing. It was its own product undertaking. I shipped a desktop tool with exportable HTML prototypes. Cloud came later, proven across 8+ subsequent releases.