Experience

Director of Product Design & Research

2021 - Present

Responsible for building the Design team and fostering a healthy design culture within the R&D organization. Led a comprehensive redesign of both web and agent platforms that addressed a backlog of user feedback, opened opportunities for platform extensibility and offered a competitive edge in sales cycles.

  • Served as the first in-house designer and established a strong foundation for design and research practices.

  • Expanded the Design team from part-time contractors to 4 full-time Product Designers and 1 dedicated User Researcher within the first quarter of my tenure.

  • Worked in lockstep with Product, Engineering, and Client Success to unlock an unprecedented number of new features and successfully integrate new technologies such as generative AI though platform extensibility.

Senior Product Designer

2018 - 2021

Served as the Design Lead for the Content Activation product line. My work primarily relied on data-driven research, interaction design, and information architecture, while establishing baseline metrics across our suite of products.

  • Championed and successfully secured dedicated design and engineering resources for the Habanero Design System. By the end of my tenure, 7 of 8 design and front-end teams had adopted the new set of standards.

  • Developed the UX strategy for Content Activation, working cross-functionally to establish customer journeys and user success metrics that enabled teams to align toward a clear goal.

Lead Designer

2013 - 2018

Played a pivotal role in designing and launching Chatbar, our first consumer product. This innovation reshaped our go-to-market approach, enabling future deals to launch our products across the biggest online retailers in the USA.

  • Spearheaded design, iterative enhancements and accessibility conformance over multiple versions of the Chatbar product.

  • Supervised research initiatives and piloted in-store experimental products in partnership with Newegg and Office Depot across the USA.

  • Established and developed design systems that drove consistency and streamlined work across Product, Engineering and Marketing teams.

Projects

2018-2021

Sensive began as an experiment to showcase real-time design updates via Figma’s API. Gaining traction with the Product Hunt community, it evolved from a plug-in to a robust project management tool for creatives.

Skills

Design Leadership

Career development, design mentorship, feedback culture, research practices, actionable quarterly reviews, product-design- engineering process iteration

UX Design

User research, usability testing, workshopping, design systems, wireframing, rapid prototyping, first-time experience, copywriting, UX metrics, agile methodologies

Tools

Figma, FigJam, Miro, Framer, Webflow, Mixpanel, SQL, Hotjar, Dovetail, Adobe Creative Suite, HTML/CSS, Tailwind UI

Volunteering

Design Mentor - ADPList

I draw from my experience as an individual contributor and leader to promote a design philosophy centered on research and ethical product decisions that positively impact the lives of the people we design for.

Education

Universidad Mayor Real y Pontificia San Francisco Xavier de Chuquisaca

Medicine and Human Health, 2009

© 2024 Diego Fernandez