Staff • Lead Product Designer
Miguel Alfredo Arias
Previously StubHub, Zillow, Trulia, Nextdoor. Design systems, growth, research. Now sole designer at Raptive — strategy, research, and design systems for a creator platform.
Much into bridging generative art and AI with a human touch — alfredalfred.dev. Also into cooking, museums, music with synthesizers & drum machines, arts & culture. Illustrator-at-large. Look for the easter eggs.
Drawn to teams that see design as a strategic partner, and team cultures that value mentorship and growth on an organizational level.
01Experience
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.
02Earlier
Embroker — Product Designer
Created the illustration design system — dynamically generated spot illustrations for marketing assets, in place of one-off production per asset.
Nest — Sr. Designer
Designed landing pages and email campaigns for product launches, and set the visual design guidelines used across email platforms.
AKQA — Art Director
Art directed email campaigns in collaboration with Apple's design team.
StubHub — Sr. UX Designer
Led visual and interaction design for StubHub's design system, building and maintaining the component library that kept the responsive web experience consistent.
Fitbit — Lead Designer, Brand
Led communication design across brand development and art direction — product pages, photography, campaigns, illustration, retail, and other web experiences.
The Bold Italic — Illustrator and Designer
Conceptualized, art directed, illustrated, and designed for online and print at The Bold Italic, a San Francisco editorial publication.
Shutterfly — Sr. Designer
Partnered with CRM managers and copywriters on cohesive email marketing campaigns, built landing pages for targeted promotions, and conceptualized photography for upcoming campaigns.
Benefit Cosmetics — Interactive Art Director
Directed a team of designers and production artists across the site, partnering with producers, copywriters, and engineering on content, mobile-compatible interactions, and e-commerce. Owned project management, art direction, storyboarding, and production end to end.
OneShare — Art Director
Designed brand identity, UI, and print for OneShare — a startup that sold a single share of stock as a literal gift. Owned design end to end: illustration, front-end development, and production, partnering with a copywriter and developers on the web applications.
Antics — Associate Web Designer
Built multiple portal sites in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for clients including Sun Microsystems, Yahoo!, EarthLink, and PayPal — managing client relations, delegating work, and supervising colleagues.
Website Pros — Web Designer
Managed client relations for a leading web-resources provider — consulting on web design options, running regular feedback sessions, and integrating back-end code to match client requirements.
Noctámbulo @ Mannon Group Corp. — Designer and Developer
Owned creative direction across web and print for clients including Coca-Cola, Twix, Coors Light, Jack Daniels, Bacardi, and Empire Entertainment — logo design, hand lettering, and full project oversight.
03Education
Savannah College of Art & Design
Graphic Design