01 Design Leadership
Leadership snapshot
Developing designers
Coached designers through 1:1s, critiques, design reviews, development plans, and promotion readiness. Helped designers grow beyond execution into stronger product judgment, clearer communication, and more effective cross-functional influence.
Clarifying product direction
Partnered with Product and Engineering to turn ambiguous requirements into clearer product problems, workflow decisions, and delivery-ready direction, using the work itself to clarify priorities and next steps.
Raising design quality
Improved design quality through stronger critique habits, clearer review expectations, and more consistent ways of working, with feedback tied to workflow fit, usability, edge cases, tradeoffs, and product clarity.
Leading in complex SaaS environments
Led design across legal tech, accounting, consulting, private equity, and AI-enabled product areas. Helped designers and partners navigate enterprise complexity, cross-product dependencies, and emerging AI patterns around automation, decision support, and trust.
02 Selected Work
Case studies in enterprise design leadership
Examples of developing designers, shaping emerging product direction, and improving the systems around design delivery.
Building stronger design habits across embedded product teams
Managing designers across AI, mobile, accounting, consulting, private equity, and legal product areas by coaching stronger product judgment, stakeholder communication, systems thinking, and confidence.
Leading design for agentic AI workflows in professional services
Managed a design team through ambiguous AI-platform work, where trust, data sources, workflow clarity, and human review mattered as much as automation. Led the team through the decisions needed to keep the work clear and usable.
Restructuring Figma to scale product design operations
An end-to-end DesignOps restructure that aligned Figma to product lines, improved ownership, reduced operational drag, and created a scalable foundation for a growing design team, with clearer structure for how work moved.
04 What people are saying
Testimonials
“Austin has a way of making complex problems feel simple. He recognized patterns across the product and helped create solutions that felt consistent, intuitive, and scalable.”
“As a manager, he was deeply invested in his people. He looked out for his team proactively and consistently found ways to position them for the greatest impact, rather than just managing the work in front of him.”
“He brought a systems-minded approach to design and consistently showed up as the kind of designer who makes the people and processes around him better.”
Product design leadership
Let’s improve how your product team designs and ships
I help teams improve design quality, clarify product direction, and develop designers who are stronger partners to Product and Engineering.
