Richard Austin

Product Designer & Developer · Founder of Whisp

• Designed, built and shipped Whisp, an AI-powered journaling app for iOS and Android, end to end — strategy, UX, visual design, engineering, subscriptions and marketing.
• Freelance product design and web development for clients, using AI-assisted design and development workflows.

Principal Product Designer · Design team lead

• Led end-to-end UX, product strategy and design execution across desktop software, native/mobile apps, the web platform, community tooling and internal tools.
• Conversion and usability improvements contributed to $1M+ in annual revenue growth and helped return the company to 15% YoY growth after several years of stagnation.
• Led and mentored a small team of junior designers; drove information architecture, search and discovery, onboarding, personalization and monetization work; set design standards.
• Partnered with executives on roadmap and prioritization; explored and implemented AI features including automated photo captioning and AI assistance for family-history projects.

Principal Product Designer · Head of Product Design

• One of five founding members of the product team at a Series A (2021) B2B equipment-leasing fintech; managed a small design team and established design culture, research practice and how design integrated with product and engineering.
• Redesigned the application flow: 43 → 15 or fewer user actions, submit rate 19% → 56%.
• Reworked e-signing: open-signing-to-fund 11% → 29%; delivered solutions reduced time-to-finance by an average of 11 days and set the company up for 135% year-over-year growth, even in a turning economy.
• Designed the customer portal and servicing flows across Salesforce account scenarios for merchants, customers and internal teams.

Senior Product Designer & UX Engineer

• In charge of design for the entire Content Services team — the internal infrastructure behind content acquisition, licensing, availability, geography restrictions, scheduling and featured content — whose work fed the consumer-facing assets that the ~40 consumer-side designers worked with.
• Design lead and development partner on the infrastructure update of PlutoTV’s backend administration platform; featured-content integrations boosted engagement and reduced licensing breaches, saving Pluto thousands of SLA credits.
• Product designer for PlutoTV Rooms, a watch-party Chrome extension shipped with three developers; 10,000+ users.

Senior Front-End Engineer / Product Designer

• Designed and built apps, portals, systems, TV, web and mobile experiences for OTT streaming, with partners including Disney, ESPN and Discovery.
• Built real-time monitoring and operational interfaces used during major live events including the Super Bowl and NBA Finals.
• Designed the Watch Together Operations Manager for Yahoo’s NFL watch-party experience; contributed to the Bindable Aurelia design system.
• Designed and built MX Studio, a no-code OTT app platform — NAB 2017 Best in Show for Technology.
• Award of Excellence – Collaboration (Jan 2019); nominated “Best to Work With” (Nov 2019). Worked across many product and platform teams in a ~140-designer organization, traveling across the US to work with teams in person.