Genie had excellent data about stakeholders. It had a poor system for capturing what teams actually knew about them.
Genie's stakeholder profiles contained everything the platform could surface automatically — engagement status, recent media coverage, organisational affiliations, AI-generated sentiment analysis. What they couldn't contain was the human context that engagement managers built up over months of relationship work: the talking points developed for a specific person, the notes from a meeting three months ago, the strategic framing that had landed well last time.
That knowledge was living in email drafts, in Google Docs linked nowhere, or in an Ask Genie chat window that would be empty the next time someone opened it. It was real intelligence, built through real effort, and the product provided no place for it to live alongside everything else.
I found this problem the way I try to find all design problems — reading feedback, sitting in on client sessions, and asking what people were doing in the gaps between the features we'd built. The answer, repeated across different accounts, was the same: they were spending a lot of time moving information between Genie and somewhere else, and then moving it back again.
4
Separate pain points unified into one design system
~4h
Manual prep time per engagement eliminated
0
Context lost between Ask Genie sessions once save-to-profile shipped
Four separate pain points — all pointing at the same gap
What looked like four different feature requests turned out to be one underlying problem: context couldn't flow. Every piece of information a team had about a stakeholder — whether they'd written it themselves, generated it with AI, or found it in a media article — had to be managed manually, and the moment they left the profile it was gone.
Copying notes required manual selection every time
Users constantly needed to move notes into other parts of their workflow — into an Ask Genie prompt, a project brief, a slide deck for a meeting. The only way to do this was to manually select all the text and copy it. For accounts with detailed multi-paragraph notes, this could take several minutes per stakeholder. One account estimated spending close to four hours reconstructing stakeholder context before a major engagement.
Exporting stakeholders silently dropped the Notes field
Genie's CSV export was well-used. But it had never included Notes. So teams who needed the qualitative context alongside the structured data had to export the CSV, then manually open each stakeholder profile, copy the note, and paste it into the spreadsheet. One account documented doing this for 40+ stakeholders before a major engagement review.
Ask Genie analysis disappeared when the session ended
Ask Genie could generate genuinely useful analysis about a stakeholder. But once you closed the chat, that analysis was gone. The next person who wanted to understand that stakeholder had to start the query from scratch — even if someone on the team had done exactly the same thing a week ago.
Important media got buried in the feed
Stakeholder profiles showed a stream of recent media attributed to that person. But not all of it was equally relevant. Teams had started pasting links to critical articles into their Notes as a workaround, but those links had no visual distinction from the rest of the note.
This wasn't a notes management problem. It was a longitudinal intelligence problem. Teams weren't trying to write notes more easily — they were trying to build a durable, traceable record of what they knew about a stakeholder that could grow and be used across the whole platform.
The same problem came back in every session — just described differently
I ran and reviewed four validation sessions in May 2026 — three with external client stakeholders and one internal team review. The Notes gap came up in all of them, because it was affecting the workflows we were trying to improve.
One client stakeholder made an argument I found important: once Genie supports richer stakeholder profiles, users should be able to save Ask Genie output directly to the profile and accumulate insights over time. They framed it as a longitudinal problem, not a convenience problem — the value isn't just having the note, it's being able to see how a stakeholder's position has evolved across multiple AI sessions over months. That reframe shaped how I thought about the entire system.
In the internal review, the export gap was confirmed as consistently requested. The question of traceability — being able to tell whether a note came from a human or from an AI, and when — was raised as something that would matter more over time as AI-generated content became more embedded in team workflows.
Design one system — not four separate fixes
The temptation with four separate pain points is to address them separately. I pushed back on that framing because it would produce a fragmented result — four independent features that happened to be adjacent. The goal was a Notes system where all four capabilities felt like natural parts of the same thing: a place on the profile where everything a team knows about a stakeholder lives, whether it was written by a person, generated by AI, or curated from media.
Rich text as the foundation
The existing Notes area was a plain textarea. I redesigned Notes to use the same rich text editor already used elsewhere in Genie for newsletters and long-form content. This immediately gave users formatting, link support, and media embedding without introducing anything unfamiliar — and created the foundation that made multi-note management feasible as a future step.
One-click copy as the default behaviour
The copy action sits next to the Notes heading and copies everything in the section to the clipboard — handling long notes, preserving formatting, and confirming with a toast message. I designed this as an entry point rather than a terminal action: the same interaction pattern should eventually extend to "send directly to Ask Genie," "link to a touchpoint," "link to a project."
Closing the loop between Ask Genie and the profile
When Ask Genie generates an analysis about a specific stakeholder, a "Save to notes" action creates a new entry on that profile containing the AI content, tagged with a provenance badge showing it came from Ask Genie, and timestamped. The longitudinal intelligence record the client stakeholder described starts to become real.
What shipped
Rich Text Notes
Reuses the existing newsletter editor; supports formatting, links, and media embeds
One-click Copy
Copies all content including long notes and formatting; toast confirmation on success
Notes in CSV Export
Optional field in the export dialog; no silent truncation; paragraph structure preserved
Save Ask Genie to Profile
Creates a note entry with AI provenance badge and timestamp; intelligence persists across sessions
Pinned Media
Pin any media item to a dedicated surface at the top of the media section; persists across sessions
Multiple Notes per Stakeholder
Per-meeting or per-theme notes; browsable by date and type — builds on the rich text foundation
From a text field to a longitudinal intelligence record
"Before this, I had to jump between Ask Genie, the profile, and my own notes doc. Now it all lives in one place — and I can trace where each piece of intelligence came from."
The system connected what had been four isolated workarounds into one coherent experience: notes that can be authored, copied, AI-augmented, exported, and historically traced — all without leaving the stakeholder profile.
Beyond the features themselves, this work solidified a principle I carried through the rest of my time on Genie. The most impactful design decisions aren't individual screens or interaction patterns — they're the information architecture choices that make a cluster of features feel like a system. Four separate pain points became one experience because I started by asking what they had in common, not by fixing each one in isolation.