Resume

ron@rjfernandez.com
LinkedIn
16507221346

I am a senior systems and product designer who has crafted and shipped revolutionary products at startups as well as Fortune 500 companies. I have broad experience designing Web- and mobile-based products and services in financial data governance, manufacturing, SaaS, AI, IoT, B2B2C, medical, unified communications, and consumer electronics. Products I have designed over my career have generated over $1 billion in direct revenues and associated sales (Palm handhelds, Amazon Kindles, and numerous service contracts).

I was trained as a designer, writer, and product manager during the nine years I worked at Apple. I design systematically—I start with business, identify user needs, design key interactions, and then deal with pixels.

HIGHLIGHTS 

  • Systems and product design leader with multi-market and multi-product experience—financial data governance, cloud, SaaS, IoT, Web, mobile, and medical and consumer hardware.

  • Effective in large or small organizations—have extensive startup as well as Fortune 500 experience (Apple, Amazon, Samsung, U.S. Bank).

  • Experienced corporate communicator and product design team leader.

  • Extensive Agile training and experience, including the alignment of design processes with developmental Agile milestones.

  • Redesigned multiple product platforms, from backends through to Web and mobile app experiences (ACME, Parsable, U.S. Bank).

  • Currently UX product manager for US Bank data analytics and governance strategy.

  • Led the creative messaging for Parsable’s $60 million funding round.

  • Designed working Samsung IoT smart speaker prototype in six months with a $200K budget.

  • Led the award-winning UX (re-)design of Amazon Kindle eReaders, contributing to multi-million dollar sales and unit shipments.

  • Led the UX design of Palm OS and applications helping create the modern mobile computing experience.

  • Designed customer support management portals for Asurion and Avaya.

  • Apple senior graphic designer, copywriter, and product manager. Created graphics and content for television and print advertising. Executed industry-first interactive media and direct-to-film print projects. Participated in hardware and software product launch events.

  • SIG-CHI Conference presenter, technical instructor, and textbook author.

  • Conversationally fluent German speaker.

EMPLOYMENT

Head of Design, Parsable Technologies (startup)
8/19 - 12/21
Led product team responsible for the design of Web-based connected worker procedure (“checklist”) authoring platform and mobile job completion application suite.

  • Rearchitected entire platform to align features with client roles and use cases. This substantially increased usability and client satisfaction.

  • Grew team from two to seven. Hired five UX designers in one year, including experts on accessibility, design systems, and healthcare procedure management.

  • Fully-integrated UX design milestones into development Agile/JIRA processes and roadmap.

  • Designed and wrote $60 million funding round presentation materials.

Senior Design Director and Senior Marketing Manager, ARTIK (Samsung IoT R&D)
8/16 - 3/19
Led in-house hardware and software R&D team to promote ARTIK, Samsung’s IoT module line. Managed ARTIK marketing, trade show, and sales materials.

  • Designed working prototype smart speaker in less than six months with integrated voice assistance, touchscreen, and mechanical interfaces for $220K. Prototype was demoed at CES 2017. 

  • Wrote, designed, and managed content and design for all IoT platform marketing efforts, sales collateral, and trade shows.

Head of Product, ACME Technologies (startup)
9/14 -7/16
Responsible for defining requirements and designing features of a multi-platform/SaaS venue management and ticket sales platform.

  • Point-of-sale (POS) app design helped win clients such as Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and New Museum in New York; DeYoung Museum and Red-and-White Fleet in San Francisco.

  • Redesigned product to align with real-world, complex B2B2C ticket sales flows

  • Designed dynamic ticket pricing model which eliminated, at one client, the need for 400+ ticket definitions. 

  • Designed and implemented a consistent template-instance hierarchy and update schema to support multiple use cases.

Vice President of Design, HAN:DLE (startup)
6/12 - 9/13

  • Designed integrated email and task management portal along Getting Things Done (GTD) principles.

  • Fully-integrated UX design milestones into development Agile/JIRA processes and roadmap.

  • Managed TechCrunch 2013 “Startup Battlefield” presentation and concurrent product launch. HAN:DLE came in second (beating Zendesk!). 

Director of Kindle User Experience, AMAZON
8/10 - 7/12
Managed team responsible for the designs of three generations of eReaders.

  • Responsibilities included systems UX, on-device look-and-feel, user testing, user documentation, and project management for the first compact Kindle, first touch Kindle, and the Paperwhite (the first backlit Kindle). 

  • Presented regularly to Amazon C-suite, including Jeff Bezos

  • Design highlights include two software keyboard designs (5-way rocker and touch interactions), out-of-box experience (OOBE), library management, on-device purchases, integrated advertising, and a complete look-and-feel refresh. 

  • Promoted standard UX design processes, specifications, systems, user testing methodologies, and deliverables across Lab126 and Amazon.

  • Identified, hired, mentored, trained, and managed employees, contractors and agencies.

Director of Product Design, Strategy & Emerging Technologies, AVAYA
Director of Product Design, Traverse Networks (acquired by AVAYA in 2008)
1/05 - 8/10

  • Designed and shipped mobile, desktop, and web clients for unified communications suite integrating voice, voicemail, contacts, video, and other services.

  • Created the systems architecture that unified non-integrated features within a common UX after no action from development or product management.

  • Documented multi-client call flow scenarios (56 unique) and functional requirements.

Senior HI Design Engineer, Human Interface Team, PALM COMPUTING
7/99 - 2/04
Founding member and manager of the Palm Human Interface (HI) Team.

  • Designed UX and look & feel of consumer applications (Palm Zire 71 camera, voice memo, and dialer), desktop clients, utilities, and on-device product tours.

  • Directed the implementation of color and high-resolution graphics and fonts in the Palm OS.

Senior Vice President, User Experience Product Manager, US Bank
4/22 - present
Responsible for the UX of in-house cloud-based data analytical services and data privacy and governance features.

  • Redesigned in-house portal to align features with users and business team needs.

  • Designed privacy validation and data governance processes for financial data moving to the could. This has dramatically increased regulatory compliance and data security.

  • Participating in the evaluation and selection of data quality tools.

  • Extensive and regular vendor management (Microsoft) to get support for bank’s needs.

CONSULTING

I am often asked by people in my network to provide design consulting services for interesting stand-alone projects. These are some of my favorites.

Insulin pump app design, Eversense
2019
Dubberly Design Office (DDO) hired me to design a mobile glucose monitor app which eventually won FDA approval.

​Senior Design Lead, ASURION
8/13 -3/14
As part of a six-month, full-time contract I designed—from scratch—an admin console for Verizon and AT&T customer support centers integrating call management, performance feedback, and knowledgebase access for a CES announcement.

Chief Product Officer, Palate Home
3/14 -9/14
Co-founded by Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini (both big names in product design), Palate Home set out to design a smart grill capable of cooking a wide variety of food, from vegetables to proteins. I designed the mobile application and the logo/branding needed for its incubator graduation and to facilitate discussions with future investors. 

Visual voicemail management
US8396456B2

Conference material bot method and apparatus
US8290136B2

Specified Constraints For Message Responses
US20100262921A1

Adapting display fonts for reflective displays
US9190025B1

Real-time communications application
US20180249004A1

CallorNot alerting application
US20160316056A1

PATENTS

EDUCATION

Stanford University, BA in History
​Aargauische Kantonschule, Aarau, Switzerland

PUBLICATIONS

The Palm Zire 71 Camera Interface
Paper and presentation to SigCHI in Vienna, Austria 

Approaching Macintosh (first and second editions)
Addison-Wesley