Handle

Handle was a productivity product for triaging email into action — built when Gmail’s feature set was still thin. Create-todo flows, calendar awareness, tags, reminders, voice input; the team took 2nd place at TechCrunch Disrupt. Near the end of the engagement, Google’s Inbox shipped with a similar posture toward triage and next work.

I owned product design for web and mobile. This is the rare case in my book where I did not also own brand — the focus was entirely product features across web and mobile. The bet was early agentic thinking: collapse inbox noise into the next action, with calendar context in the same system.

Today's stack for the product

Today I'd frame Handle around one outcome: an email that needs action becomes a task without the user retyping anything. The core interaction would be a Claude-powered copilot that reads the thread and proposes the todo: who it's for, when it's due, which label applies. The real design question isn't the suggestion but the correction. A chip appears inline, one motion accepts it and writes the task, tags the people, and sets the reminder, any field edits in place, and undo is always there. Below a confidence threshold, the copilot stays quiet.

I'd outline that loop as a thread script, generate first layouts from it, and then build the survivor in Cursor against the real component library. Figma's Code Connect would map each component to both its React web and SwiftUI implementations, so one design decision lands on both platforms. A set of anonymized real threads would act as the eval: every prompt or UI change gets scored on how often the suggestion is right and how fast a wrong one gets fixed. Agentic UX only works when the suggestion is right often enough to trust and easy to correct when it isn't.

QA would move upstream. Storybook holds every empty, error, loading, and low-confidence state for web and iOS, and Chromatic catches visual regressions on every pull request. The quality bar becomes something the team checks automatically, not a last-week bug bash.