José is an AI business assistant for restaurant owners — people who run their businesses on instinct and long hours, and don't have time to sit with dashboards. I lead frontend and some times take up UI/UX designs, working alongside backend, product, and marketing.
At a glance
Role: Frontend Lead
Company: SCALEDai
José is built by a small cross-functional team at SCALEDai - backend, product, marketing, and me on frontend. My work spans three surfaces: the marketing site (joseai.ca), the authentication flows, and ongoing frontend development on the product itself. The landing page came together in close collaboration with our marketing lead through many rounds of iteration on copy, design, and voice. On the product itself, I handle frontend development and UI/UX work as the product evolves.
What José is
José is a business assistant designed for independent restaurant owners - a segment that's typically underserved by enterprise business-intelligence tools. Instead of showing dashboards and asking the owner to interpret them, José looks at the business every day and answers plain-language questions directly: "Did we make money this weekend?" gets an actual answer, not a chart.
The audience is specific: restaurant owners who work on instinct, long hours, and gut feel. People who don't have time for software marketing or complex onboarding. This audience shapes every design decision in the product.
The landing page
The brief was to reach restaurant owners in their own voice - not the voice of software marketing.
Most business tools sell themselves with dashboards, feature lists, and abstract efficiency claims. That approach loses this audience immediately. The landing page needed to sound like a smart friend explaining what José does, not a SaaS pitch.
The build was genuinely collaborative. Our marketing lead came in with a rough copy template - an initial structure and tone - and from there we worked through many rounds of iteration on both the copy and the design. She sharpened the message; I built the design in Figma using José's brand system, brought illustrations and layout choices to the table, iterated with team feedback, and shipped the whole thing to production. The final page reflects our judgment together with input from the rest of the team.
The result reads warmer and more direct than typical B2B SaaS. Pain-point checklists rendered as sketches. A comparison of "generic dashboard chaos vs. one straight answer from José" that shows what the product actually feels like. Copy in the restaurant owner's voice - "I didn't open this place to spend my nights doing math" - that assumes the audience is smart and busy, and skips the marketing-speak.
What I designed and shipped
Landing page (joseai.ca). I designed the José marketing site from Figma to production. The hero moment, pain-point section, the "how José is different" comparison, and the Founders Table CTA all went through many rounds of design, demo, and refinement with the team before shipping. Once designed, I built the page end-to-end in code and shipped it live.
Authentication surfaces. I designed and built the registration and login pages independently. These sit at the boundary between the marketing site and the core product - they need to feel like a natural continuation of the landing page's warmth while functioning as serious product surfaces.
Product frontend. Beyond the landing page and auth flows, I lead frontend development for the José web application - implementing dashboards, data-heavy report views, and interactive input flows. As the product evolves, I also take on UI/UX work for new features. Access to the product itself is currently limited to approved restaurant partners while the team continues refining ahead of a wider launch.
Where it landed
The José landing page is live at joseai.ca and actively converting visitors into Founders Table signups. The web application is in private access with approved restaurant partners actively using it - real restaurants running their operations through José as the team iterates toward wider launch. My work continues on the product frontend as the team grows the feature set and prepares for a wider rollout.
Reflections
Marketing pages aren't just marketing. The José landing page was the first project where I really understood how much a marketing site shapes product perception. If the landing reads corporate, the product reads corporate. If the landing reads human, the product gets the benefit of that framing before a user has even signed in. Design decisions on the marketing side are product design decisions in disguise.
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Frontend engineering as a design act. Leading frontend development taught me how much implementation is where design lives or dies. A mockup can look perfect in Figma and feel wrong when shipped - because of loading states, empty states, hover feedback, keyboard handling, and a hundred other small choices the mockup doesn't specify. Being both a designer and the person who ships the code means I can make those calls consciously.
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Collaboration is a design skill. The landing page taught me that "designing collaboratively" isn't the same as "designing by committee." Working iteratively with our marketing lead through many rounds of copy-and-design refinement was where the page got sharp. She'd sharpen the message; I'd respond with visual choices; we'd both critique the result. Neither of us could have built the page alone - the design and the message needed to be shaped in conversation. That kind of tight iteration between marketing, design, and engineering is one of the real advantages of a small team.