Meeting Context
Farid and Ofir met with Navan's Edge engineering team for a full technical walkthrough of Edge 2.0. The goal: give our UX team enough context to run an independent design exercise grounded in real architecture and constraints.
In the transcript, "Me" = Farid. "Them" = various Navan speakers (primarily Snir, Danny, and Yaya). Tom was not present.
Engagement Scope
Navan's ask: Run a UX exercise covering conversation design, homepage, and search results. They're migrating from a proprietary platform called "Cognition" to a LangGraph-based architecture.
SCOPE AGREEMENT
Standalone POC
We build an independent prototype. No contributing to their codebase. No API keys. Fake data, real frameworks. LangSmith for agent prototyping. Farid: "We don't want to work in a vacuum."
DELIVERABLES
Prototypes, Not Figma
Documents + working prototypes in a GitHub repo. Real front-end code Navan can pull from. Farid: "Figmas for this type of product are not helpful at all." The team agreed on this format.
EXPECTATIONS
Two Tiers of Proposals
Navan wants multiple approaches: one audacious / ahead-of-the-curve, one industry-standard. Research-backed, structured output that tells a story.
Three Workstreams
Three distinct areas of work crystallized during the meeting. Each requires its own research, prototyping, and proposal track.
WORKSTREAM 1
Homepage & Navigation
What lives outside the chat. Trip surfacing, contextual components on the home screen, "where you left off." Navan confirmed components can render anywhere—not just in chat. Major navigation problem: users lose their conversation when they navigate away.
WORKSTREAM 2
Search & Discovery
How to help users who don't know exactly what they want. The "homework problem"—current results dump too much on the user at once. Flight/hotel result presentation, browsing vs. booking modes, multi-city complexity.
WORKSTREAM 3
Conversation Design
Onboarding, tone, pacing, iteration vs. dump, personalization cold start. Users don't see value until ~5th session—most never get there. Navan wants proposals from conservative to audacious. Dia browser cited as onboarding reference.
We don't want to work in a vacuum. And we don't want to suggest things that will make your life completely impossible.
— Farid, setting the engagement tone
Key Takeaways
The eight things that matter most for Tom coming into this engagement cold.
Action Items
Current status of all commitments from the meeting.
Deep Dives
Detailed breakdowns from the meeting, organized by domain.
GUI protocol, placeholder system, agent hierarchy, mobile strategy, feature parity.
Demo observations, trip lifecycle, onboarding approaches, conversation design questions.
Cognition, LangGraph, Activity Snapshot, Swarm, Draft Trip, and other Navan-specific terms.
Otto, Miso, Gondola—what three AI travel startups reveal about Navan's actual moat.