Designer working at the edge of engineering.

Reed is a product designer who has spent his career on small, ambitious teams — the kind where the line between design, product, and engineering gets blurry on purpose. Most of his work has been zero-to-one: figuring out what a product should be, shaping the first version that ships, and then evolving it as the company learns what it actually has on its hands. He's at his best in the early, undefined parts of a product, where the problem isn't "make this screen better" but "what is this thing, who is it for, and what would make it indispensable?"

That work has taken him through three very different industries. He started in transportation at TBS Factoring Service, designing for a freight factoring business where his users were trucking dispatchers, owner-operators, and back-office staff who needed software that respected the speed and precision of their day. From there he moved into energy at Zeno Technologies, an upstream oil and gas SaaS startup building a financial performance platform — what the company called the Energy Operating System — for executives running production-era businesses. Over three years he grew from Senior Product Designer to Head of Product Design, working on dense, data-heavy interfaces where the cost of a confusing chart was a misread forecast or a missed investment decision. Both chapters taught him the same lesson from different angles: the most interesting design problems live inside the messy, technical, high-stakes domains most designers avoid, and the constraints of a regulated or expert-driven industry are what make the work matter.

Today he's Staff Product Designer at AnswersNow, a healthcare technology company building clinical software for Board Certified Behavior Analysts and the families they serve. He works across two product surfaces — Care Operations and Therapy Experience — partnering with the CPO, engineering leadership, and clinical stakeholders to define how the product evolves. A lot of that is traditional zero-to-one design work: shaping new product areas with PMs and clinical leads, translating strategy into shaped pitches, and staying close to engineering during the build so design decisions get resolved against real constraints, not static screens. He's also been writing the documentation that defines how the design discipline fits into the company's process — career ladders, job descriptions, team structures, and the philosophical work of articulating where design belongs when the company is moving fast and the framework is still forming.

What he's most invested in right now is how AI is reshaping the design discipline and its relationship to engineering. He built a local sandbox environment with mocked APIs so he can prototype against real components without touching production. He's worked with the engineering team on design system governance using Figma Code Connect and the Figma MCP, with the goal of making the handoff between design and code one-to-one. He writes Claude skills to automate the parts of his workflow that don't need a human — ingesting meeting transcripts, surfacing design tasks from Slack and Notion, syncing project context across tools — so he can spend more of his time on the work that actually requires design judgment. His belief is that the next generation of product designers won't be defined by their fluency in Figma alone, but by their ability to operate across disciplines: to think like a PM, build like an engineer, and use AI as a force multiplier on all of it. That's the practice he's building, and the practice he wants to bring to whatever comes next.