Staff ~ Lead Product Designer
Miguel Alfredo Arias
Previously StubHub, Zillow, Trulia, Nextdoor. Design systems, growth, research. Now sole designer at Raptive, doing strategy, research, and design systems for a creator platform.
Much into bridging generative art and AI with a human touch, at 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: 230 token values, 63 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.
03Education
Savannah College of Art & Design
Graphic Design