I design products people can read, and brands people remember.

I am Michael, a product designer in Salt Lake City. Over ten years I have designed at Facebook, Netflix, and Square, and helped build a company from nothing. The job, as I see it, is to find the one thing a person needs to understand and design around it.

Lately I work where design meets AI, building tools that help small teams ship good work quickly. I am happy in Figma, in code, and in motion, and I like learning whatever the problem needs next.

LelandDesigner and builderAI-native design system, internal tooling2024 to nowAutoPilotDesign leadZero to one: brand, product, CRM, marketing2024 to nowAftrpartyCo-founder, design leadConsumer app, both app stores2023 to 2024SquareProduct designerRisk: Contracts, Reserves, Tiered Reserves2021 to 2022NetflixUX design leadInfoSec vendor platform on Hawkins2020 to 2021FacebookProduct designerLead Ads, Groups, Newsfeed, Pages2018 to 2020UberContract product designerOffline-first driver recruitment kiosk2018VivintJunior product designerHome automation services2017 to 2018
Full resume (PDF)

What I am learning

  • Agentic design tooling

    Building Claude skills that let a whole company ship on-brand work without a designer in the loop.

  • Motion and 3D on the web

    Shaders, WebGL, and scroll-driven motion. The orb on the home page is hand-written GLSL.

  • Music

    Producing in Logic Pro. Melodic, ethereal, built one layer at a time.

Travel (22)

Quotes

Bryan Rees
Bryan ReesProduct Design Manager, Square
“Michael is a thoughtful designer with high emotional intelligence that pays dividends in his relationship with users and his peers.”
Gregory Nolan
Gregory NolanSr. Security Business Partner, Netflix
“Beyond his apparent skills, he is also great to work with. He is patient, punctual, efficient, and always delivers.”
Jaclyn ZhuangProduct Manager, Facebook
“He was extremely communicative about priorities and timelines, and made sure to check in with me if there were competing asks.”

Interests

  • Fashion
  • Watches
  • Hats
  • Live music
  • Fly fishing
  • Mountain biking
  • Basketball
  • Tennis
  • Football
  • Languages
  • Music production
  • Music videos
M

Say hello

Working on something that needs a designer who can also build it? Or just want to talk about any of the above?

Get in touchLinkedIn