Sobero is a mindful drinking app born from a behavioral insight: people quitting smoking often start questioning their relationship with alcohol too. As Product Design Lead at Kwit, I helpted to shape this new vertical from zero — leading research, product strategy, and a team of 3 direct reports across 8 months to ship a science-based, market-ready product.
Impact
11.7% download-to-trial conversion in month one (vs. 7.5% top 25% benchmark, RevenueCat).
Science-based MVP launched in 8 months under significant resource and timeline pressure.
Led and expanded Kwit into a new behavioral health vertical.
Kwit's core product helps people quit smoking. As the user base matured, we identified an opportunity to expand into adjacent behavioral health verticals.
Opportunity space
We mapped 3 potential candidates — sugar, alcohol, and screens — aligned with Kwit's mission of helping people build healthier lives. To evaluate them, we ran qualitative research with existing users on their first 6 months, focusing on how their lives shifted after starting to reduce or quit smoking.
The signal that came back was consistent: alcohol kept surfacing as both an emotional trigger and the next frontier users wanted to address. Paired with a broader cultural shift — the sober-curious movement — alcohol became the clear first bet.
My role
I was Lead Product Designer at Kwit when the opportunity of building Sobero appeared. I was responsible of guiding both execution and strategic direction. I managed a team of three designers while also being hands-on across key areas of the product, including user research, product strategy, information architecture, and UI design.
My role included co-designing the Sobero brand identity and shaping its storytelling to ensure a coherent narrative from positioning to product experience.
On the strategic side, I was part of the committee shaping Sobero from zero to one, defining not only the core user experience but also the business model.
We grounded our decisions in the U.S. alcohol-reduction market, with Reframe as a key reference for behavioral change and subscription-based models. Insights from a Kwit experiment—where we shifted from freemium to a premium-only model in the U.S. market with strong results—further reinforced our approach to pricing as part of the product experience itself.
As a small start-up with an existing product to maintain, our most significant constraint were resources but also time.
Trade-offs
A priority shift mid-process reduced our working time from 12 to 8 months, with a hard January launch deadline tied to a business seasonal peak existing for habit formation products. This forced sharp prioritization decisions. The most meaningful trade-off was community vs. gamification.
Even if both were planned features, but we could only build one properly. Research made the call clear: modifying behaviors around alcohol, unlike smoking, is rooted on a needed support or community layer. Gamification was deferred.
We also deliberately minimized feature scope while protecting the core behavioral model.
When shaping Sobero's identity, we kept returning to a single question: How do you make choosing a healthier behavior feel like a meaningful act rather than a restriction?
Bonus: Brand storytelling
The answer came from an unexpected place — astronauts. Astronauts go alcohol-free in space not because they have to, but because the mission demands it. They make a deliberate, values-driven choice in service of something bigger than a moment of comfort.
That reframe — from restriction to intention — became Sobero's north star. Our users weren't giving something up, they're choosing clarity and intention. The space metaphor connected their everyday acts to something expansive and aspirational.
