Richard Austin

Principal Product Designer · Product Design Engineer

I design complicated products and somehow make them feel less complicated.

Hi, I’m Richard. For 10+ years I’ve worked in the messy middle between product, design, engineering, business and the people who actually use the thing — as a designer, a front-end engineer, and a design leader. I figure out what matters, make it clear, and get a team to something better that actually ships.

Where I’ve done itFOREVER · Clicklease · PlutoTV / Paramount · Verizon Media · Yahoo · AOL

Start with the big one →Résumé
Product design, UX and front-end engineering — often all three at once
10+ yrs
and NBA Finals live-ops tooling for streams at massive concurrency
Super Bowl
Application submit rate after redesigning Clicklease’s apply flow
19% → 56%
Annual revenue growth at FOREVER from conversion and usability work
$1M+
Selected case studies

Five stories, each a different kind of hard.

  1. Uplynk Service Assurance channel view: slicer and audience previews side by side, live viewer chart, concurrent sessions and ad insertion error rate.

    01Verizon Media

    Keeping the big games on the air

    Real-time monitoring and operations tools for live streams — the stuff broadcasters stare at during the Super Bowl and the NBA Finals.

    Role
    Senior Front-End Engineer / Product Designer
    Outcome
    Collaboration award of excellence; tooling for Disney, ESPN and Discovery at major-event scale
    Read the case study
  2. Clicklease customer portal shown across several phones: welcome screen, upcoming payments and lease details.

    02Clicklease

    Getting small businesses funded faster

    Head of product design at a Series A B2B fintech. Rebuilt how merchants and customers apply, sign and manage equipment leases — and how design works with product and engineering.

    Role
    Principal Product Designer · Head of Product Design
    Outcome
    Submit rate 19% → 56%. ~11 days faster to finance. Set up for 135% YoY growth.
    Read the case study
  3. FOREVER Valet desktop app: a dark photo library grid with upload, download and activity controls.

    03FOREVER

    Modernizing a platform built to last 100 years

    Principal Product Designer leading a small design team across desktop software, mobile, web and internal tools — IA, onboarding, conversion, monetization and early AI features.

    Role
    Principal Product Designer · led the design team
    Outcome
    $1M+ annual revenue growth; 15% YoY growth after years of stagnation
    Read the case study
  4. PlutoTV internal campaign tool: a "Paramount Plus Upsell" campaign with region and territory settings, 77 distribution targets and a row of primetime billboard slots.

    04PlutoTV · Paramount

    The machinery behind free TV

    Led design for the whole Content Services team — the internal tools that decide what plays where, when, and for whom across a free streaming service.

    Role
    Senior Product Designer & UX Engineer · Content Services design lead
    Outcome
    Fewer licensing problems and SLA issues for content operations
    Read the case study
  5. Whisp app on a phone showing “Your journey this week” with a weekly reflection.

    05Whisp

    Designing an AI product that doesn’t pretend to know

    A journaling app for signs, dreams and synchronicities — designed, built and shipped solo to iOS and Android, with AI in both the product and the process.

    Role
    Founder · design, product, engineering
    Outcome
    Live on iOS and Android
    Read the case study
How I work

Structure for fuzzy problems. Without the process soup.

  1. 01

    Find the real problem first

    Most “UI problems” are system problems wearing a UI costume. I map how the thing actually works — data, states, people, money — before I draw screens.

  2. 02

    Design with engineering, not at it

    I’ve spent years on both sides of the handoff. I prototype in code when it’s faster, talk tradeoffs in plain language, and care about what ships, not what’s in Figma.

  3. 03

    Just enough process

    Research, sprints, prioritization frameworks: useful tools, terrible religions. I use what the problem needs and skip the process soup.

  4. 04

    Make the complicated legible

    Dense doesn’t have to mean confusing. Operators, underwriters and schedulers deserve good design as much as consumers do.

  5. 05

    Tie it to an outcome

    Submit rates, time-to-fund, revenue, fewer 2 a.m. incidents. If we can’t say what changes, we’re decorating.

  6. 06

    Lead by making things better

    Mentoring, standards, critique and exec alignment — ideally without anyone having to be told there’s a new process.

More work

Smaller projects worth a look.

Designer who can still make the thing.

I started out writing front-end code and never really stopped. At Verizon Media I designed and built streaming tools in Aurelia and TypeScript. At PlutoTV I led design for the whole Content Services team. At Clicklease and FOREVER I ran small design teams — culture, standards, roadmaps, the conversations with executives — while staying hands-on.

These days I also build with AI every day: I designed and shipped my own app, Whisp, and use AI seriously to design and build — prototypes, websites, production code. It’s a new tool, not a new personality.

More about me