Koda, which became CareerTruth, is a career management platform I founded and designed end to end. It helps professionals understand themselves as a career asset, plan intentionally, and build the human relationships that actually move a career.
Send a resume, track applications, land an interview. Useful, but downstream of the real problem: most professionals have never been given the tools to understand themselves as a career asset, their values, their purpose, the people who can accelerate them.
Koda was built to solve that upstream problem. I founded the company and served as sole designer, bringing values and purpose work, structured goals, AI-assisted coaching and a curated advisor network into one integrated system.
I ran 40 interviews across industries and stages: early-career professionals feeling directionless, mid-career managers stuck in roles that no longer fit, senior leaders who had optimized for title and pay but felt unfulfilled. The pattern held everywhere.
People who struggled with transitions were not lacking opportunities. They could not articulate what they stood for or what they were building over a ten-year horizon, so every job search was reactive instead of intentional.
The experience begins with My Plan: a reflective values exercise (pick five to seven from a curated taxonomy, distinguishing values you live from values you perform), a purpose statement and a career vision. The output becomes the north star the whole platform references, goals, coaching and advisor introductions are all contextualized against it.
Career platforms treat networking as a feed or a booking tool. I designed it as infrastructure. Every user builds a personal board of advisors and manages those relationships over time, with native messaging, scheduling and structured prompts.
The hard part was making relationship quality visible. It is easy to track whether a meeting was booked, harder to surface whether the relationship is productive. I designed engagement signals, response frequency, conversation depth, session notes, so users can see which relationships are thriving and which need attention. A Growth Coach layer adds professional coaches matched on values, with session context and AI-generated conversation starters always in view.
Career development is long-horizon work with invisible short-term progress, which is exactly why people abandon career tools. I designed Solution Progress: a persistent indicator, always in the nav and annotated with the user's current focus, that aggregates plan completion, goal actions, coaching sessions, advisor conversations and library engagement into one visible measure.
The Board of Advisors drove the highest NPS of any platform element: professionals called a structured advisor network the most valuable thing they had ever built for their careers. The retention numbers validated the foundational bet, that self-knowledge work is the hook, not a barrier.
The most durable professional tools do not optimize the transaction. They build the self-knowledge and human infrastructure that make every career decision better.
Koda became CareerTruth, and the thesis it proved is the one I carry into every product now: start upstream, with who the person is, and the downstream decisions get easier on their own.
Founding and designing it solo, from brand to the last screen, is the clearest test of product judgment I have had. Every cut was mine, and so was every bet that paid off.