A global crowdfunding platform
My longest engagement so far: several years of donor- and campaign-facing product work on a large, global crowdfunding platform, spanning the React/Next.js/TypeScript frontend and the Node.js services behind it.
The shape of the problem
Two audiences share one platform and want different things from it. Donors want to find a cause, trust it fast, and give without friction. Campaign creators want to set up a page, tell their story, and see how it's doing, without needing an engineer for every change. Most of what I built sat at that seam.
What shipped
- Donor-facing discovery and checkout flows in Next.js/TypeScript, iterated against real usage instead of one big redesign.
- Campaign-creator tooling for building and editing a campaign page without a deploy, backed by Builder.io as a headless CMS.
- Node.js services supporting both sides: campaign data, donation-processing hooks, and the content pipeline feeding the frontend.
What got cut
Not everything that made it into a sprint made it to production. Creator-side personalization ideas stayed on the backlog once PostHog showed donors weren't the ones who needed them, and a configuration step aimed at creators got deprioritized in favor of checkout work, where a small change touched every donor. Scope kept moving toward the flows the data said mattered.
What the data said
PostHog gave the team a shared view of what people actually did on a page, not what a meeting assumed they would do. Funnel and session data on checkout drove which steps got simplified first. Datadog watched the services in production, so a regression showed up as an alert before it showed up as a support ticket.
Ship, measure, monitor
Builder.io, PostHog, and Datadog closed a loop: content and features shipped without waiting on a full deploy cycle, usage data said what actually mattered, and observability caught what broke before donors noticed. That loop is still how I think about product work: decide less from opinion, more from what is actually happening in production.
Stack: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, Builder.io, PostHog, Datadog