Within three months of starting, we were running a live product with real paying customers. Agent Reach was an experimental startup venture built inside REA Group to be deliberately fast and lean, while operating inside an enterprise with established ways of working. As the sole designer on a team of external consultants, I owned design end-to-end: from early concept and customer research to proving product-market fit and the shipped product experience.

To get to market fast, the product manager and I ran a Wizard of Oz. We manually bought ads and generated reports while the product looked and felt automated to users. Integrating with existing systems meant working around technical debt and organisational dependencies that constantly pushed back against the startup pace we needed. Agent Reach became sustainably profitable and was subsequently integrated into REA's broader product suite, evolving into what is now Agent Edge and Audience Maximiser.