Thomas Amador
Product Design Leader
Design leader with 8+ years of experience creating value through open and transparent collaboration and innovative product discovery processes. Experience across discovery and delivery in multiple industries with a diverse background in computer science, industrial design, art and teaching. Relationship builder and visual storyteller with a proven record of innovative problem solving.
Experience
Useful App, Inc
Design Leader
AUG 2022 - JAN 2024
Designing AI-powered B2B SaaS experience as sole designer and second hire in seed stage startup. Took experience from initial concept to beta launch of AI-powered sales training and enablement platform.
- Collaborated directly with leadership team on product strategy and planning from initial concept to production
- Designed and implemented design system with an emphasis on flexibility and speed of implementation for a small team
- Conducted and summarized early user interviews as part of ongoing user discovery
- Generated new concepts weekly as product evolved and changed through two major pivots and many smaller ones on the way to PMF
Charles Schwab Corp
Sr. Manager - User Experience Design
AUG 2019 - AUG 2022
Creating innovative digital retail onboarding experiences with a distributed cross-functional product team across Retail and Managed investing services.
- Co-created a new onboarding product vision and strategy with Product Director that led to the formation of the 70 person ROAR team in 2020
- Co-designed and facilitated Schwab’s first and largest fully-remote journey workshop series 4 months after the 2020 general quarantine with 50 people across 3 time zones participating in 6 full-day sessions over 3 weeks
- Co-designed, developed and evangelized new ‘experience platform’ that has now been scaled to over 45 digital retail onboarding account flows
- Designed, tested, and implemented new design template library to unify and scale the design of onboarding flows across multiple teams while dramatically reducing deliverable overhead
- Designed, tested and evangelized new tools and processes for product delivery and discovery and team connection that are now in use in across multiple teams and organizations
- Organized 2 major events for Schwab UX including a discussion with the Sr. Director of Design from Invision and an early movie screening and QA panel with product leaders across Digital Services during the global pandemic
Amador Consulting
Product Designer
2016 - Present
Creating measurable business value for early stage startups and small businesses through design strategy informed by primary user research and discovery workshops. Delivering design systems, UI kits and experience concepts.
Clients include:
AffiniPay, Experiment Zone, Verb, Woom bikes USA, Pleasanton Tutoring, PerpetualFX Interactive
REI Co-op
Outdoor Instructor
2014 - 2019
Trained staff in five states while teaching in-store and field classes for wilderness and urban survival as well as camping and hiking skills.
Education
ArtCenter College of Design
BS, Entertainment Design
DEC 2009
Texas A&M University
Computer Science
2001 - 2003
Skills
- Team building
- Creative coaching
- Workshop facilitation
- Visual storytelling
- Sketching
- Storyboarding
- Wireframing
- Prototyping
- User interviewing
Tools
- Pen + Paper
- Mural/Miro/Figjam
- Figma
- Webflow
- Framer
- Adobe CC
- VS Code
- Linear
Interests
- Cognitive psychology
- Evolutionary biology
- Complex systems
- Wilderness survival
- Concept art
- Writing
- Aikido