Design & UX Leadership

Every product is a promise.

And I bring that promise to life with interactive models that drive alignment. My design-to-deployment engines collapse weeks of exploration into working artifacts, shipped in days. Strategy decks describe the future… I build it.

Areas of expertise: Design organizations · Product & UX strategy · Enterprise and consumer platforms

Toolbox:
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What I Believe.

Design is an engine, not an artifact. Figma is where the work starts. Design is done when there’s a working prototype. Everything else is theater.

A product is a promise kept. Alignment isn’t a static insight found in a research lab; it’s a living agreement sharpened in production. I hone in on the user’s intent by shipping, not theorizing—using fast, iterative deployments to prove what actually resonates.

Storytelling is a functional prototype. I use narrative to visualize the invisible. Whether it’s a telematics model or an agentic AI layer, storytelling is the fastest way to align stakeholders and users on a product’s “frequency” before a single line of code is written.

Rigour requires a studio, not a committee. I bring the MFA studio-critique model to enterprise builds. We move fast, but we maintain the high-fidelity alignment of craft and strategy that defines world-class products.

Results

If it didn’t move a number, what was it for?

196M+

Arity — Potential MAU reach across Experian, Alarm.com/ADT, and SiriusXM/Pandora SDK partnerships.

+280%

Champion Gaming — Subscriber growth after product, mobile, and subscription-funnel redesign

0–20

Wipro Digital — Founded the U.S. experience-design practice and grew it to roughly 20 people

6.1×

Sears Holdings — Email opens: 0.7% to 4.3%, our recommendation engine vs. Rich Relevance

Case Studies

Strategy in action

Three situations that map to where I work best: mobile and SDK products, early-stage growth, and enterprise platforms. How I read each one, and what I did about it.

Arity
Elevated night view of a city intersection with vehicle light trails
Connected-vehicle data Experiences that had to live inside someone else’s product.

The Problem

Arity’s core business was built on insurance risk models. Partners in consumer finance and home safety needed to see what connected-vehicle data looked like inside their own apps. How would the data manifest as insights that add value? My objective was to show the value as an interactive experience rather than static slideware.

The Approach

I designed for Mobile Publishing and served as a design partner to the sales, marketing, and GTM teams. The SDK work solved for problems around consent and permissions, as well as embedding solutions such as crash detection, driver coaching, and predictive mobility marketing offers within existing partner experiences. These solutions were driven through a customized three-stage path from wireframes to branded examples to coded assets.

The Method

The pipeline started with an internal enterprise knowledge layer — strategy documents, raw telemetry definitions, domain context — fed into frontier LLMs to generate the product framing and initial interaction logic. Figma Make supplied visual starting points. Cursor handled the build: data integration, mapping APIs, functional interaction, and iterative refinement against real feedback from product and sales. The first working prototype took roughly two weeks. Major revisions landed in about ten days after that.

In addition to the SDK work, I applied this method to two other domains: a regional traffic-intelligence prototype for public-sector customers, and a trade-area intelligence prototype built on road-level movement patterns. Six-plus functional iterations in sixty days — working software the team could stress-test, not decks they had to imagine.

The Outcome

Three SDK partnerships closed during my tenure — Experian, Alarm.com/ADT, and SiriusXM — representing 196M+ potential monthly active users across consumer finance, connected home, and in-car audio — with solutions spanning crash detection, driver coaching, and predictive mobility marketing. The prototyping method changed how the organization sold: instead of walking a prospect through a slide deck and asking them to imagine the integration, we put working software in front of them and let them react. Sales cycles shortened. Internal alignment happened faster because product, engineering, and analytics were all looking at the same functional artifact. And the method itself spread — other teams adopted the pipeline after seeing what it produced.

Champion Gaming
Product screens EdjSports and Football Outsiders on desktop and mobile. Click to browse all views.
Click to expand

The Problem

Champion Gaming had respected sports-intelligence products and a loyal expert audience, but growth had stalled. The experiences were dense, difficult for new users to enter, and inconsistent across content, analytics, subscription, desktop, and mobile touchpoints. The challenge was to broaden the audience without flattening the depth that serious fans and bettors valued.

The Approach

I rebuilt the subscription path by cutting steps, clarifying the value of each tier, and reducing friction between discovery and purchase. Across Football Outsiders and EdjSports, I reorganized the product experience so mobile users could reach a useful decision quickly while desktop users retained the analytical depth they expected. I also connected editorial, matchup data, predictive analytics, and wagering information into a more coherent product model.

The Outcome

Football Outsiders subscribers grew 280% and revenue increased 22% year over year. Across EdjSports, pageviews increased 206%, session duration rose 279%, and bounce rate fell 35%. The result was not simply more traffic: people understood the offering, stayed longer, and were more willing to subscribe.

NielsenIQ

The Problem

Nielsen was splitting in two — a $6B divestiture. The consumer intelligence side was becoming NielsenIQ, an independent company. The product portfolio was sprawling: over 100 enterprise applications built or acquired over decades, no shared design language, duplicated features everywhere, inconsistent branding. Thousands of global clients in CPG, retail, and media depended on these tools every day. All of it had to be rebranded and brought into alignment while the company was being torn in half.

The Approach

I led a 13-person UX organization with four direct-report managers. First I overhauled the design system — modular code snippets, flexible design tokens, a shared repository that worked from design through to front-end dev. Then I connected with my VP counterparts in branding and corporate marketing and proposed a cross-functional governance body I called the Nielsen Design Collective. The CMO approved it and we presented to the board. From there we audited the full product portfolio, ran weekly sessions over several months to communicate the new standards, answer questions, and hand off changes to local app teams. Final step was inspecting what we expected — signoffs, decisions on the outliers, and making sure it stuck.

The Outcome

The design-system overhaul was completed by mid-June. The Nielsen Design Collective received CMO approval and was presented to the board in July. Weekly rollout sessions continued through the fall, with final signoffs in January. In twelve months, 111 applications were reviewed and more than 100 launched under the NielsenIQ brand on schedule while the 13-person UX organization remained intact through the divestiture.

Design Examples

Process and outcomes

A closer look at how the work actually gets made — and the artifacts it leaves behind.

Synthesis dashboard — Jesse's Desk overview screen with category cards and key metrics
Design Workshop

Synthesis Turning enterprise data
into a decision workspace

A NielsenIQ workshop example showing how research, pre-work, team friction, concept development, and organizational alignment shaped a complex analytics product.

Practice

AI should raise the quality bar, not just move faster.

I’ve transformed the traditional Double Diamond into a Design-to-Deployment Engine. By integrating agentic AI pipelines into my craft, I’ve compressed the design-to-deployment cycle from weeks to days while significantly increasing the depth of exploration.

Key Milestones

High-Definition Inputs

Garbage in, garbage out. I start with deep contextual grounding.

Contextual Synthesis

Compressing the horizontal breadth of problem-framing.

Functional Artifacts

Expanding the vertical depth to ship testable code, not just mocks.

Explore my Agentic Design Practice

Approach

How I lead

What holds up, no matter where I go.

Align and extend

Every engagement starts the same way: get the business priorities, team capabilities, and product reality lined up before you commit to a direction. I’ve walked into NielsenIQ with 111 applications and a reference library that couldn’t actually be deployed, nine brand experiences at Foot Locker, and three legacy studios at Rosetta that still went to market as separate identities. The first job is never “start designing.” It’s getting everyone pointed in the same direction.

Align, then extend

U.S. Bank

Wipro / US Bank

The problem: A transformation program worth tens of millions with one UX designer embedded downstream, and a March implementation start already on the calendar.

The move: Six weeks and $48K to build an experience model as proof that the product direction could hold.

The result: Delivered in late January, well received by the client, and converted into an approximately $3M, three-year UX/UI contract. My team delivered for roughly 12–18 months.

That is the pattern: align the business, team, and product reality first, then extend with confidence. When the direction is right, speed compounds instead of creating rework.

The organization has to outlast you

I don’t build organizations around a single leader. I build them around shared principles, clear operating models, and an understood reason for the work. At Wipro I founded the U.S. practice and grew it to roughly 20 people. At AOL I took a team of seven to roughly 55. At Rosetta I led 76 people across nine offices. When the principles and decision structures hold, the organization keeps moving whether I am there or not.

Career

Where I've been

2023 — 2026 Director, Design Lead Arity (Allstate) — Defined mobile SDK experience strategy and led GTM design for Arity’s expansion beyond insurance. The work included consent and permissions, embedded partner experiences, driver-behavior segmentation, and functional prototypes supporting opportunities with Experian, Alarm.com/ADT, and SiriusXM/Pandora.
2022 VP, User Experience GreenPark Sports — Joined as GreenPark’s first UX/experience leader, bringing product strategy and end-to-end interaction design to an organization that already had 3D design and engineering capabilities. Partnered with the CEO on a pivot toward mobile community voice chat, runway-focused restructuring, NBA licensing, and MLS supporter-group micro-networks.
2021 — 2022 VP, Product Design & Dev Champion Gaming — Led product design and growth strategy across Football Outsiders and EdjSports, rebuilding mobile and desktop experiences, information architecture, subscription, and sports-intelligence products. Subscribers grew 280% and revenue increased 22% year over year.
2019 — 2021 VP, User Experience NielsenIQ (Nielsen) — Led a 13-person UX organization through a $6B divestiture. The Nielsen Design Collective reviewed 111 applications and launched more than 100 under the new brand on schedule.
2017 — 2019 Senior Director, UX & Product Foot Locker — Built a 14-person product and UX organization across nine global retail brands and ran the testing program behind roughly 7% conversion improvement.
2014 — 2016 Digital Practice Partner Wipro Digital — Founded the U.S. experience-design practice and grew it to roughly 20 people. Reset a failing U.S. Bank engagement with a $48K proof of concept that secured a three-year, ~$3M contract.
2012 — 2013 SVP / Partner, CX Rosetta (Publicis Groupe) — Led UX nationally across 9 offices, 76 people. Unified UX culture across three acquired studios post-acquisition. ~25% pitch close rate across 43 presentations in the first year.
2008 — 2012 Director, Customer Experience Sears Holdings — Led UX for a strategic R&D group reporting to Chairman Eddie Lampert, building the experience layer for personalization, ecommerce, email, and the Sears Catalogue app. The broader program contributed to 20% online revenue growth while supporting a $41B store business.
2007 — 2008 Creative Director Razorfish (Microsoft) — Creative direction and eCommerce strategy for P&G, JC Penney, Navteq, DeVry. Key role in winning JC Penney's $25M AOR contract.
2006 — 2007 Interactive Creative Director Coldwater Creek — Led first site redesign in seven years for $1B retailer. +32% pageviews, reduced cart abandonment, 40% online conversion lift YOY. Grew design team 200%.
2001 — 2006 Director, Design AOL (Time Warner) — Defined the content and traffic strategy across Netscape, CompuServe, and AIM. Conceived the Netscape traffic catalyst that drove +4M monthly sessions to CNN. Grew team from 7 to roughly 55.

Let's talk about what you're building.

I’m open to VP and Director-level product design leadership roles, transformation mandates, and focused advisory engagements. If the organization’s ambition has moved beyond its current product experience, let’s talk about what needs to change.

dgiordan@mac.com LinkedIn