About
Part designer, part engineer, fully allergic to process soup.
I’m Richard Austin — a Principal Product Designer who spent a lot of his career writing the front-end code for the things he designed. I like the messy middle: where product, design, engineering, business and operations all need something different and nobody’s quite sure what the product should be yet.
Over 10+ years I’ve designed live-streaming operations tools used during the Super Bowl, the licensing machinery behind a free TV service, fintech flows that decide whether a small business gets funded, and a consumer platform that promises to keep your family photos for a hundred years.
What ties it together is that I’m useful when things are complicated. I take fuzzy problems and give them structure, make technical products understandable, and get product, design and engineering pulling in the same direction — without inventing ceremony for its own sake.
Leadership is mostly what changes because you were there.
Run small teams well
At FOREVER and Clicklease I led small design teams — a couple of designers each — while staying hands-on. At Clicklease that also meant helping a five-person founding product team decide how design works: research habits, design sprints, open prioritization, and design that fits into engineering sprints.
Own an area end to end
At PlutoTV I was in charge of design for the entire Content Services team — the operational machinery behind the app — working alongside the ~40 designers on the consumer side where our work touched theirs.
Collaborate across everything
At Verizon Media I worked across many teams at once, traveling around the US to work with them in person, and received an Award of Excellence for collaboration and a “Best to Work With” nomination. At FOREVER I partnered with executives on the roadmap.
Stay hands-on
I still design the hard screens and prototype in code. Leading from inside the work keeps my judgment honest and makes me easier to work with for engineers.
Product design is the headline. Engineering is the superpower underneath.
For a big chunk of my career my title had “engineer” in it. At Verizon Media I designed live-ops tools and built them in Aurelia and TypeScript, and contributed to our themeable design system. At PlutoTV I was a designer and UX engineer.
That background shows up in small ways every day: I know which design decisions are cheap and which will cost a sprint, I think in components and states, I can prototype beyond static screens, and I care about what actually ships.
Lately that includes AI. I use it seriously — for exploring design directions, writing and reviewing code, and building real products. I designed and built Whisp that way, along with websites like this one. It’s a new tool in the kit, and a genuinely good one, not a new personality.
The short version.
Now
Independent · Whisp
Freelance product design and front-end work, and building Whisp — an AI journaling app I designed, built and shipped myself.
FOREVER · 2023–2026
Principal Product Designer · design team lead
Led a small team of junior designers. End-to-end UX and product strategy across desktop, mobile, web, community and internal tools. Conversion, monetization, IA, design standards, mentoring and early AI features. $1M+ revenue growth; 15% YoY.
Clicklease · 2021–2023
Principal Product Designer · head of product design
Led a small design team and built design practice at a B2B fintech startup and redesigned application, signing and servicing. Submit rate 19% → 56%.
PlutoTV · Paramount · 2021
Senior Product Designer & UX Engineer
In charge of design for the entire Content Services team — licensing, availability, scheduling and featured-content tools — whose work fed the consumer apps. Designed PlutoTV Rooms.
Verizon Media · Yahoo · AOL · 2016–2021
Senior Front-End Engineer / Product Designer
Designed and built live-streaming ops tools, apps and systems for TV, web and mobile — for partners like Disney, ESPN and Discovery, and events like the Super Bowl and NBA Finals. Award of Excellence for collaboration.
What I bring to a team.
Product & strategy
- Product strategy & roadmaps
- Prioritization & tradeoffs
- Executive partnership
- Monetization & conversion
UX
- Complex workflows & systems
- Information architecture
- Research & usability testing
- Lean UX & design sprints
Leadership
- Design culture & process
- Standards & critique
- Mentoring
- Cross-team alignment
Build
- JavaScript / TypeScript
- React, Aurelia, Node
- Design systems in code
- Git, Docker, AI-assisted development
Outside of work
I run a men’s group called I Love You Bro — a place for guys to actually talk to each other. It turns out a lot of what makes a good design leader (listening, asking the next question, making it safe to say the hard thing) is useful there too.
The rest of the time I’m usually traveling, on a horse, or on a river. I used to endurance race on a horse named Maverick, and I fly fish — typically with a tenkara rod, which is about as minimal as fishing gets. My pup Murphy tags along whenever he’s allowed.