PF Product App
Nobody asked for it — I built it anyway, giving Property Finder's entire product team one always-live source of truth for every asset design makes.
- Role
- Sole Designer & Developer (Personal Initiative)
- Team
- Solo initiative · Property Finder Design Team
- Timeline
- 2026 · Ongoing
- Discipline
- Product Design · Design Ops · Full-Stack
Nobody asked for the PF Product app. Nobody had filed a ticket, raised a complaint, or scheduled a meeting about it. I spotted a problem the team had quietly accepted as normal and built the fix myself. It started as an icon library. It's becoming something much bigger.
The problem.
The design team's assets lived in a Figma file. That was it. No single source of truth, no clear versioning, and no reliable way to know whether the icon you were looking at was the latest one. Engineers were pulling assets from Figma without knowing if they'd already been revised. PMs were sliding into my DMs asking for product videos that didn't exist anywhere accessible. Everyone had their own workaround, and none of them talked to each other.
Figma is a design tool, not an asset distribution system. We'd been using it as one. There was no infrastructure for getting assets to the people who needed them in the format they needed them. Because nobody had ever built that infrastructure, nobody had a clear picture of just how much time was being lost to the gap.
Three things we learned.
A Figma file is not a source of truth if no one can agree which version is current.
When icons changed, and they did, there was no reliable signal. Engineers shipped old versions. Designers referenced outdated components. The problem wasn't the assets themselves. It was the absence of a distribution layer that could reflect updates in real time.
PMs were wasting time chasing assets that didn't need to be chased.
Product videos weren't stored anywhere accessible. Every time a PM needed one for a deck, they came to me directly. I was the bottleneck, and I was the only one who saw it. Solving this wasn't just about making my life easier. It was about removing a dependency that was slowing the whole team down.
The right infrastructure already existed. It just needed a front end.
Google Drive, Sheets, and Jira were already part of the team's stack. The missing piece wasn't more tooling. It was a purpose-built interface that connected those systems in a way that actually matched how people worked.
The decision.
Organise the Figma file better
Clearer naming, stricter component governance, a pinned comment linking to the latest version. It's still Figma, still no export path, still no way for non-designers to self-serve, and still me as the bottleneck the moment anyone needs a video.
Build a native macOS app — alone
A tool I would design and develop myself from scratch, using Google Drive as the asset backend, Sheets for configuration, and Jira for request tracking. Starting with icons and illustrations, with the explicit intention of expanding scope over time.
I wanted to build something that could grow. An app has a surface area a Figma file never will. You can add sections, extend functionality, and bring in new asset types without breaking what already exists. I used Claude as a development partner to move fast, shipping the parts I could build quickly and accelerating through the parts I couldn't.
What we shipped.
The gallery.
Impact.
PF Product went from an idea no one had asked for to a tool the wider product team uses daily. What used to take several minutes (hunting through a Figma file, exporting at the right size, not knowing if you had the latest version) now takes seconds. Engineers pull correct, current assets without asking. PMs grab product videos without pinging anyone. The design team fields fewer interruptions and has a formal paper trail for every asset request. It started as an icon library. Slowly, deliberately, it's becoming Property Finder's product team daily app: the place you go when you need anything the design team makes. That was always the intention. It's just starting to show.
The best initiatives are the ones nobody schedules. I didn't wait for a brief, a ticket, or a green light. I saw the friction, lived it myself, and built something that fixed it. What made the difference wasn't just identifying the problem. It was having a broad enough vision for the solution that the tool could keep growing. PF Product is still growing. Internal tools rarely get the design attention they deserve. This one does.