Leading and scaling product design at Tive
Scaling design judgment, not just design output
- Team leadership
- Operating Model
- Enterprise platform
I Lead Design and stay hands-on
Player-coach design leader · 16 years in product design
Design Lead and Manager at Tive. Previously at Stitch Fix, Modern Health, Built Technologies, Anomalie, and ModCloth.
Strengths
Serving startups, growth-phase Orgs, and Post-IPO companies in systems, leadership, and strategy
Growing a strong team
- Managing senior designers
- Teaching systems thinking and mentoring others
- Setting individual growth plans and helping my team reach their goals
Leading small teams through rapid growth
- Stitch Fix: first design hire, created and led the platform design team
- Tive: hired two designers, launched career ladders and growth plans
- Anomalie: Head of Design through a digital rebrand
Scaling enterprise products
- Design processes that meet teams where they are
- Repeatable patterns for cross-platform designs and architecture
Owning the system as a product and a platform
- Roadmapping, strategic alignment, and prioritization
- Ownership from ideation through migration, maintenance, and evolution
Design and code alignment
- Token implementation and management
- Figma-to-code and code-to-Figma
- Technical architecture
Repeatability
- Cross-team governance, contribution, and release processes
- Documentation for humans and machines
- Faster time-to-live while maintaining high quality
Consistency of craft
- WCAG compliance baked in, with easily tested, highly extensible designs
- Design judgment encoded into guidelines
- AI-assisted UI audits, code alignment, and quality assurance
Opportunity identification and problem framing
- Identifying customer problems
- Risk analysis and solution planning
Product vision and direction
- Design roadmapping
- Translating ambiguous objectives into clear product strategy
Strategic prioritization and tradeoffs
- Balancing customer value, business impact, technical feasibility, and resources
- Scoping and release planning, aligned with engineering on delivery
Business impact and value creation
- Anomalie: rebrand increased engagement 25% and retention 40%
- Modern Health: personalized home screen raised return rate 25% against a 30-day benchmark
- Connecting decisions to adoption, retention, and revenue through monetization, branding, and positioning
Designing in code
- Proposing and pushing production-ready designs
- Designing with real data: an object card pattern that renders UI from any data
- Claude turns code and API documentation into design documents
AI prototyping for rapid decision-making
- Claude prototypes in code to test direction before engineering builds it
- Risk-based validation that tests direction earlier and reduces downstream rework
Work
examples of the product and systems work that shaped how I lead today
Growing adoption across 9 product teams at Stitch Fix
Introducing the Mode Design System
- Design systems
- Governance
- Enterprise platform
Launching global navigation in the design system at Modern Health
One navigation system, globally adopted
- Design systems
- Cross-platform
- Engineering partnership
More Work
Earlier design projects and outcomes
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Scaling the Timber Design System at Built Technologies
Directed system architecture across 7 product teams, growing the library to 150+ components and adoption from about 40% to over 90% during my year on the team. Set up the Timber Guild so design and engineering shared ownership.
- Read on Medium
Creating an Accessible, Scalable Color Palette
Redesigned the color palette for all web and mobile platforms (member, provider, client) at Modern Health as part of the Vita design system, helping raise WCAG accessibility coverage of coded components from 50% to 95%.
- View the Presentation
Launched a Personalized Home Screen
Designed a modular home screen at Modern Health that raised the customer return rate by 25% against a 30-day benchmark and launched algorithmically personalized content.
- View the Presentation
Designing a Returns Process That Reflects Reality
Redesigned warehouse returns at Stitch Fix around real-world operations. Associates moved items through their queue 1.5x faster on average, and counted errors fell by about 15%.
Career
I love coaching designers, partnering deeply with engineering, and wrangling complex systemic challenges
My Career
Craft, code, systems, and leadership all inform how I work
- 2010 Modcloth - Product Designer
- 2012 Stitch Fix - First Designer
- 2017 Stitch Fix - Design Engineer
- 2019 Stitch Fix - Platform Designer
- 2020 Anomalie - Head of Design
- 2021 Modern Health - Systems Leader
- 2023 Built Technologies - Systems Leader
- 2024 Tive - Design Lead and Manager
How I Lead
Clarity from ambiguity. Autonomous Designers. Reusable foundations. Design that ships.
Let’s Work Together
Boru.design@I am an experienced design leader and I want to help you with AI-enabled design, design-engineering processes, and strategic product initiatives.