Note: This writeup is just scratching the surface of my experiences at Atlas and numo. A longer case study is forthcoming! In the meantime, I encourage you to get in touch for more details.
In 2019 I joined the founding team of a startup — code named Markup. From day one we had an embarassment of riches: a privileged first customer, a generous runway, an experienced founding team, and six months of high‑caliber user research guiding us. I began as the founding designer but stepped into a variety of leadership roles until our acquisition by RSA Archer in 2023.
Challenges
- High barriers to enterprise adoption and a heavy compliance burden
- Covered leadership gaps as interim CEO and Head of Product
- Maintained momentum and team health for a 3–10 person team during pandemic disruption
Approach
- Leveraged a 6‑month research program to define JTBD, regulated‑content archetypes, and risk surfaces used across multiple product cycles
- Dogfooded prototypes across the incubator to pressure‑test workflows, discover edge cases, and shorten iteration loops
- Embedded the first customer in planning and reviews to prioritize must‑have controls and refine product‑market fit
- Led through ambiguity by stepping into interim CEO and Head of Product roles to align stakeholders and keep the roadmap moving
Outcomes
- Shipped an enterprise‑grade MVP platform for regulated content with access control, versioned editor, workflow engine, and auditable capabilities
- De‑risked initial deployments via codified governance patterns and operational playbooks
- First company in the incubator to exit; acquired by RSA Archer in 2023
The numo approach
The numo playbook began with rigorous research and design ideation to generate fintech startup ideas. A second round of analysis filtered that pool of ideas by market need and size. Then they built founding teams with the skills to design, build, and go to market with those ideas.
From there we operated like independent companies to hire, build, test, pivot, and ultimately exit the incubator.
Having also founded a startup via angel and VC channels, I was acutely aware of the competitive advantages this offered us:
- Incubator providing advisory support to leadership team as well as back office services
- Bank providing stable funding runway as well as sending a trust signal to the market
- Favorable equity terms
Design challenges
Design for Markup began with a central question: can we bring version control to complex content?
Pursuing answers to this seemingly simple question took us through all sorts of interesting and complicated challenges around interaction and trust and collaboration and the kind of company we wanted to become.
Why Atlas mattered
The problem
Modern enterprises have so many tools at their disposal and yet somehow still fall back on meetings and email attachments to collaborate on documents. This is only more pronounced when those documents are highly regulated, such as policy frameworks or standard operating procedures in banking, travel, or energy.
The solution
Atlas Document Management addressed this need.
- Enabling end-to-end auditable, versioned edits for high‑stakes documents, reducing risk in regulated content operations
- Consolidating versioning, approvals, and releases into one flow to cut handoffs and increase reliability
- Offering configurable workflows aligned to regulatory events without code, speeding adaptation to change
Ultimately we were acquired by RSA Archer — now Archer Integrated Risk Management — in 2023 to augment their policy management offering.
