Resume
Chicago, Illinois · [email protected] · linkedin.com/in/mekael · mekaelwr.com
Experience
Runwise
2023 – now
Senior Product Designer
Heating, cooling, gas, and water controls on one wireless device, in 10,400+ multifamily buildings. $173M+ in customer savings. I was the first designer hired.
AI and automation
- Designed the approval gate before an agent changes anything: drift, expiry, permissions, audit trail. An AI that adjusts real buildings needs a person who can see what it did and undo it. Building the gate first is what let us ship agent changes at all.
- Built the agents behind it. They read our codebase, answer in plain English, and can write the fix, but a person approves before anything ships. Cut one report’s turnaround from six minutes to one. Named each like a job title so people knew what to expect.
Product and measurement
- Won the case for one consistent review step before any heating setting changes, instead of hiding fields case by case. Fifty-plus settings on live boilers, and a wrong value means cold tenants. The screen carries 38–55% of all pageviews, 32 months running.
- Led savings. Twenty interviews found customers couldn’t see the number the entire product exists to deliver. Rebuilt it around one recent bill, in therms. Now the second most-visited part of the product.
- Rebuilt notifications and alerts, then designed the control that stopped the false alarms: 1,677 bad flags a month down to 258. The weekly summary email gets 5–10× the reads and clicks the old one did.
- Utility account sign-ups went from 5% to 30% in nine months. To show a building its savings we need its utility login, which means asking a busy manager for one. The data model behind it was the wrong shape, so I redrew it.
- An empty state I designed on the water tab sourced a closed deal. The head of product’s attribution.
- Brought product analytics to the company. Nobody was measuring what people actually did, so I set it up and built the first dashboards. They are still what the company runs on. When we tested turning the mobile app into a PWA for low-service basements, the speed dashboard I built is what we used to decide whether to ship it.
- Redesigned the temperature target control and moved behavior with it: notably more people now set a target instead of running a one-off boost. A boost is a patch that expires. A target is the actual fix.
- Shipped breadth, not just depth. In one six-month review period: expanded graphs, the temperature target control, the People page, building settings, the Gas tab, the RF network tool, and a way to see a building’s active target. The graphs are what finally moved our own team off the legacy app.
Working with the team
- Run the weekly cross-functional design forum with product, engineering, customer success, sales, and field technicians. I cover metrics and design reviews when the head of product is out.
- Prototype in code, in the open. Fourteen merged exploration sets in a shared repo, each with three or four working directions instead of one recommendation. Engineers and PMs argue with something real instead of a picture.
- Work the team needed that nobody owned: moved us from Trello to Linear, ran the exercise that ranked our product bets from the prior year against what actually happened, and co-ran the brand workshop. None of it was assigned.
Systems and hardware
- Built the design system so every screen uses the same parts: color rebuilt across 61 files, design and code sharing one set of names. Replacing one custom control with the shared component deleted 769 lines across 26 files.
- Owned the design for the Gen 2 hardware platform: eight products into 1,300+ buildings. That included a language of blinking lights for equipment with no screen, so an installer knows the signal holds before bolting the sensor down. (PM’s numbers: $300K a year saved, 35% more weekly capacity.)
Rheaply
2021 – 2023
Senior Product Designer
Software that helps tech campuses, hospitals, and universities track the furniture and equipment they already own so they reuse it instead of buying more. Now 3,400+ organizations. Seed into Series A, and where I started writing production code.
- Sole designer on the system that inventoried Google’s Bay Area campus. 238 buildings of assets nobody could count. 46 research sessions, then 10,000 items in month one, more than the platform had ever taken in.
- Invented the product-sets data model after my first attempt failed in build. Four hundred identical desks used to mean four hundred records. Now they are one product with 400 items, each with its own condition, which is what made counting a campus possible.
- Redesigned admin reporting so a customer could defend a reuse program to their CFO: one report per metric, each explaining its own math. One customer reported $226,000 in identified value and 14,000 pounds diverted. Their results; the reporting made them countable.
- Redesigned the primary data-entry form: 22 fields, 163 submissions a day, and I couldn’t delete one, because every field fed a search index. Tested three navigation models and jump navigation won. Completion settled at four minutes for 600+ people. Built alongside the engineers shipping it.
- Shipped and reviewed frontend in the production repo. 133 contributions across 2022, including 33 commits and 17 pull requests in June alone, one of them 1,470 lines. Login styling, menu styling, dropzone copy, an intercom entry point. I also reviewed other engineers’ work: analytics events, nav styling, a status filter, a CSV import page. My own contribution record, private repos.
- Set up product analytics here first, two years before I did it at Runwise. Session replay and tag management, dashboards for product usage and errors. Same instinct both times: nobody could see what people actually did, so I went and made it visible.
- Ran weekly company-wide design office hours, and most attendees weren’t designers. It turned into reworking how the PM team wrote development tasks.
Earlier roles
2012 – 2021
In-house product teams, one agency, and seven years of freelance running alongside all of it. Usually the only designer on the project.
- @properties, 2020–21. Sole designer on the digital listing presentation replacing a 60-page printed book agents shared and rented. Competitors copied the book one-to-one; I built a luxury visual language instead: thin type at wide tracking, double borders echoing the molding in a room.
- Adage Technologies, 2019–20. Turned a year of analytics into ten numbered insights for a $35M+ distributor. Scored every usability problem by severity, then used that to cut scope when the client wanted more than the budget allowed. Ran discovery workshops on site.
- Red Frog Events, 2018–19. Design team of one across three brands, running Google Ventures design sprints as five-day workshops with stakeholders. Built seated ticketing from scratch and closed the gap that had been sending seated venues to Eventbrite.
- MWR freelance, 2012–19, 25+ clients. Buildout, 2017–18, a CRE platform now used by 50,000+ brokers. John Ronan Architects, 2017.
Brands I’ve designed for: Overture Center for the Arts · Ellsworth Adhesives · Firefly Music Festival · Warrior Dash · Chicago Beer Classic · Eventsprout · @properties · Science of Sport · Health Technology Forum · Booth Hansen · John Ronan Architects
Skills
- Design
- Product and interaction design, design systems, information architecture, complex stateful flows, data visualization, UX writing, usability testing, primary research, accessibility
- AI
- Agent design, approval gates, permission and expiry rules, audit trails, setting expectations for what an agent will do
- Data
- Tracking, dashboards, funnels, weekly metrics review
- Engineering
- Front-end development, Figma-to-code token pipelines, Git and PR workflow
- Leading
- Cross-functional collaboration with product, engineering, data, sales, and field teams. Company-wide design office hours, teaching non-engineers to prototype, the design job description, culture interviews
Tools
- Design
- Figma, Storybook, After Effects
- Code
- React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Git, Vercel
- Data and AI
- PostHog, Cursor, Claude Code
Education
B.Arch, University of Arizona