Staff • Lead Product Designer
Designing consumer product experiences at the intersection of strategy, systems, and craft to make the complex and ambiguous feel clear and human.
Open to the right opportunitiesSan Francisco, CA Pacific TimeContact
Tools & Experiments
design-token-vitalsGrades the health of a codebase's design token layer, and reports what it cannot prove.
component-contractOne small file per component that both the design decision and the shipped code answer to.
idea-builderCoaches James Webb Young's five-stage method — gather, connect, incubate, capture, refine — for building an idea from scratch.
Work
Lab
Soothsayer Groovebox MachineA browser-based groovebox and step sequencer, built on Tone.js and the Web Audio API.
Pocket SketchbookPaper and a blue grid in the browser — a drawing surface that keeps what you make.
Design By BulletinAn always-on bot that researches, writes and art-directs a design magazine on a schedule.
Major ArcanaA tarot deck and reading machine, drawn and dealt in the browser.
Experience
Raptive
Staff Product Designer
- Sole designer for the entire Community product: research, UX, UI, and systems across web, iOS, and Android, supporting 12 to 15 engineers.
- Early vision work I shared with the CPO became the company's first-year Community roadmap, before a product org existed.
- Introduced research in year one, surfaced a retention crisis nobody had quantified, and moved executive leadership to reprioritize auth and onboarding.
- Built a 0→1 design environment in four weeks: 224 tokens, 45 components, CI-integrated.
Miguel Arias Creative
Design Consultant & Founder
- 20+ year independent practice building products, systems, and editorial work at the intersection of craft and strategy.
- Carrier: Building a design tool connecting research, decisions, and impact — AI features for Slack feedback synthesis, pattern detection, and team alignment. Built on Prisma with a fine-tuned local model.
- Design By Bulletin: Founded and run an AI-driven editorial publication on Telegram. Designed custom subscriber onboarding UX and multi-agent research-to-synthesis pipeline.
- Editorial work published in Computer Arts, SF Weekly, The Bold Italic, 3x3 Illustration Annual, and others.
- Owlio: Built the Figma design system a small startup needed to move with product teams instead of behind them.
Nextdoor
Staff Product Designer, Growth
- Redesigned Neighborhood Faves, the annual voting experience: votes nearly doubled from 9M to 16M, with 700k shares and a +32.5% lift in weekly active users.
- Designed AI-powered business discovery. ML auto-tagging made neighbor word-of-mouth visible to the platform, lifting in-comment recommendations +84%.
- Owned a platform-wide button system overhaul, surfaced by my SMB research, while leading growth design across Feed, Map, and Pages.
- Changed how growth teams defined job maps, mentoring designers inside and outside my pod.
Zillow Group
Sr. Product Designer, Design Systems
- Built the Trulia and Zillow design system 0→1 — tokens, grid, and component architecture — to 100% adoption across product, search, and neighborhood pages. Still in use years after my tenure.
- Defined the component lifecycle, creation through deprecation, and it became the process every UX team followed.
- Facilitated cross-team workshops across SF and Seattle that gave six departments a shared way to settle design debates.
- Sequenced the rollout for momentum: high-traffic archetype pages first, which built the case that scaled adoption everywhere else.
The logic chain
2000
Underground
Designer and developer at Noctámbulo, which pioneered online magazines in Puerto Rico's underground — each with its own live forum.
2003
Study
Design and visual communications at Universidad Sagrado Corazón, then Savannah College of Art & Design — overlapping Noctámbulo, not following it.
2005
Interactive
Web development at a marketing agency, then interactive art direction — a financial-literacy startup, Benefit Cosmetics, and Shutterfly.
2011
Editorial
Illustration and design for The Bold Italic, also published in Computer Arts and SF Weekly.
2014
Agency
Fitbit, Nest, AKQA, StubHub — where mobile design began. Campaigns built with Apple's design team, StubHub's responsive component library.
2016
Product
Trulia, Zillow, Nextdoor. Design systems at 100% adoption across four products; Neighborhood Faves from 9M votes to 16M.
2022
AI
Began at Nextdoor with gen-AI business discovery, lifting in-comment recommendations 84% — now at Raptive, a 0→1 environment in four weeks.
Toolbox
Mock before build.
Business requirements, product logic, and design intent rarely agree on the first pass. Mocking finds where they conflict before code has to pick a side. I build against the production token library from the start, so the static version and the shipped one are never speaking different languages.
- Claude Code
- Cursor
- Midjourney
- Figma
- HTML · CSS
- JavaScript
- React · Next.js
- Tailwind · TypeScript
- Conductor
- Playwright
- Browser dev tools
- Design tokens
- Netlify
- Vercel
- GitHub