PHILONET.AI
Building a more meaningful social-reading experience
Worked with the product team to improve onboarding, engagement and the reading-to-discussion experience through user feedback, product observation and iterative product decisions.
Role: Product Management Intern
Product Discovery
User Research
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Engagement
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UX
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Product Iteration
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Prioritisation
The product
Philonet.ai is a social-reading platform built around the idea of 'read and think together.' Users bring articles from elsewhere, highlight sections, comment and share perspectives, invite friends or different viewpoints, and discover or participate in reading discussions.
The product was already launched when I joined. I worked collaboratively with the product team across onboarding, engagement, UX, user feedback and product iteration.
READ → THINK → DISCUSS
Problem -From reading to meaningful discussion
Philonet.ai was built around the idea of “read and think together,” but getting users from simply reading an article to actively contributing and returning was difficult.
The core product challenge was:
How do we turn passive reading into meaningful participation and sustained discussion?
Discovery questions
- Do new users understand the value of the product quickly?
- What makes someone contribute their first thought?
- What kind of content creates sustained discussion?
What I found?
The engagement problem started before discussion
Product behaviour, admin-panel signals, and team/user feedback pointed to several friction points across the journey:
Onboarding
New users did not always understand the product's value quickly.
First contribution
Moving from reading to sharing a first thought required more encouragement.
Content fit
The type of content available influenced whether users had something they wanted to discuss.
Return behaviour
Getting users to participate once did not automatically create a reason to return.
The deeper issue was that users needed a clear reason to read, think, contribute, and continue participating.
Engagement was not just a notification problem
This meant improving engagement could not rely on a single feature or notification. The product experience itself needed to make the value of participation clearer and reduce the friction between reading → thinking → contributing.
The Insight
The decision
Strengthen the core reading-to-discussion loop before adding complexity
The product team focused on three priorities:
Make the value of Philonet clearer during onboarding.
Encourage the first meaningful contribution.
Simplify the experience rather than continuously adding features.
There was also a positioning trade-off around content: focused categories could provide clearer initial positioning, while broader categories created more room for exploration and discovery.
What I did
Improving the path from reader to participant
I worked with the product team across onboarding, engagement and product iteration.
1. Onboarding
Iterated on the onboarding experience based on feedback from PMs, readers, writers and professors to communicate the product's value more clearly.
2. First contribution
Explored recognition, notifications, appreciation and encouragement to help users move from: Reader → Contributor → Participant
3. Content strategy
Contributed to discussions around focused versus broader content categories and the trade-off between early positioning and long-term exploration.
4. Product simplification
Identified redundant interface elements and supported their simplification or removal.
5. Feature exploration
Explored ideas such as reading time, in-platform vocabulary and research/AI assistance to support the journey: Read → Question → Research → Form an opinion → Contribute
Some ideas, such as the animal-spirit reading archetype, were ultimately dropped because they risked making the product too heavy.
THE PRODUCT LOOP
READ → THINK → DISCUSS
This was the core experience the product was trying to strengthen: reading creates the input, reflection creates the thought, and discussion turns that thought into participation.
Impact
The work helped make the product's value clearer, encourage early contribution, and simplify the reading-to-discussion experience.
It also helped the team think about engagement as a product experience problem, rather than something that could be solved through notifications alone.
What I learned
01
Engagement is a product problem, not just a notification problem.
02
Cold-start requires social design.
03
More features can make a product weaker.
04
Product positioning is a trade-off between clarity and room for exploration.