Maya Oyelaran

Maya spent the first week in the workshop rather than at a desk, and it showed in everything that followed. She understood that the mark had to work stamped into wet clay before it worked anywhere else, which is not a constraint I had thought to explain. We came away with a system I have applied myself a dozen times since without needing to ask her what was allowed.

We had eighteen months of feature requests and an app that showed all of them at once. Maya's first deliverable was a list of things to remove, with the reasoning attached, and it was uncomfortable reading in the best way. Support tickets about the settings screen dropped to almost nothing after launch, which is the only metric I actually cared about.

What I valued most was being told no. We asked for a heritage look and Maya explained, with examples, why that would put us in the same bracket as companies charging half our price. She was right, and the version we shipped has aged far better than the one I originally asked for would have done.