Mekael Wesley-Rosa, product designer in Chicago
Hi, I’m Mekael
I’m interested in using design to improve the way complex systems work. Whether they involve people, software, hardware, or AI, I enjoy understanding how they behave and making them simpler, more reliable, and easier to use.
Today I do that at Runwise, where our software helps operate more than 10,000 apartment buildings. Over the last few years I’ve redesigned major parts of the product, built tools for installers and operators, and spent a lot of time figuring out where AI actually helps instead of just sounding impressive.
When I’m away from my computer I’m usually grilling, working on our house, or being confidently corrected by a three-year-old.
Say hi at
Selected work
The project I talked us out of
A year of finished designs, then I pulled the numbers: 498 sessions out of 334,512. I made the case to the head of product who’d been asking for them, and what I proposed instead shipped.
An agent that answers, and a tool with no SQL parameter
I built the agent that answers questions about our own software for people who don’t write code. The retrieval was the easy half. The work was how it answers, and giving its data tool no way to accept arbitrary SQL.
Redesigning the whole app without turning it off
First designer they ever hired. Six months, nine screen areas, every one rebuilt while thousands of buildings ran their heat through it mid-season. One empty state sourced a closed deal.
A credential flow from 5% to 30% conversion
Every piece of this belongs to somebody else. I argued the architecture was the wrong shape, got to redraw it, and conversion went from 5.1% to 29.9% over nine months.
The only designer on the system that inventoried Google’s campus
238 buildings, five organizations, and nobody agreed what the words meant. Forty-six research sessions and six workshops later, ten thousand items landed in the platform’s first month.
An interface for radio waves
One dead repeater quietly takes a whole branch offline. Two surfaces off one state model, now running in 1,300+ buildings: a dependency-ordered dashboard, and a language made of blinking lights.
Tooling for people standing in a basement
Installs lived in a binder of tribal knowledge. Ten guided flows in six weeks, seven of them in a day, and 40% of installs now need no trained technician at all.