Trove
Building an AI-native case study builder which is a reasoning partner, not just a case study generator for product designers targeting the best companies.
OVERVIEW
01 — THE CHALLENGE
The best work never gets written up.
Designers ship exceptional work but rarely have the bandwidth to document it at the level hiring panels demand. As a result, portfolios go stale exactly when capability needs to be legible fast.
General AI assistants don't know what the best companies actually respond to. Case study generators optimize for speed, not depth. Neither closes the real gap — no tool is a reasoning partner that helps curate the best case studies.
02 — THE APPROACH
Building the Judgment Before the Product
I built the reasoning engine before the interface. Before any conversation flow existed, I designed a skill architecture — knowledge skills that define and hold all the knowledge, and capability skills which can execute a task by referencing a knowledge skill (or multiple knowledge skills).
On top of that, I designed three reasoning states: Support, Pushback, and Refine. So Trove could decide in real time whether a designer's answer deserved encouragement, a deeper question, or a challenge. The architecture came first because no interface would matter if the system underneath couldn't distinguish between strong and weak thinking.
03 — THE SOLUTION
A Reasoning Partner, Not just a Generator
Trove ships as two complementary modes. Guided Conversation asks one question at a time, responding in Support, Refine, or Pushback based on what the designer actually says - no forced flow, no fixed sequence. Brain Dump lets designers drop everything they already have: Files, Figma links, URLs, and notes onto a canvas, so Trove can synthesize that context and ask sharper questions from the start.
04 - The outcome
0 to 1 AI product
A good case study used to take a few weeks to put together — pulled together across scattered evenings, rewritten more than once as a designer second-guessed which details mattered. With Trove, that same depth can be curated in an hour or two — not because the standard dropped, but because the right questions get asked in the right order, the first time.
The product is live at trytrove.in
NEXT PROJECT
Stonecraft Group →