I practice human-centered design leadership: empowering designers to do their best work in order to deliver amazing user experiences at enterprise scale. I lead with empathy and a long track record of strategic decision-making. These are some of my strengths and accomplishments as a design leader.
As a member of product design steering committee at Nasdaq, I worked across organizational silos with other design leaders to align on design system architecture, interaction design standards, and career paths.
From 2021–2023, I led the complete redesign of Nasdaq.com to align with new brand and established digital brand guidelines. I collaborated with internal engineering teams and multiple agency partners to simultaneously evolve Nasdaq.com’s content authoring experience, visual design, and design handoff processes. I collaborated with Nasdaq’s internal brand & creative team, the product design steering committee, and agency partners to expand and ratify new brand standards for digital application.
I’ve developed a reputation for growing global design practices from a team of one. At Nasdaq, my advocacy for digital transformation resulted in growing from a team of one to four direct reports in the United States and Bangalore, India.
At Optaros by MRM//McCann, I led business development for creative-driven RFPs and grew the design practice at the e-commerce agency from team of one to managing seven direct reports, including user experience design, visual design, research, copywriting, and front-end development.
As a skilled generalist, I understand designers’ strengths and tailor my role in each project to be complementary. I stay connected to designers and the work they do to make a design practice resilient: I can get into Figma and code to provide coverage and make strategic, structural design decisions. Whether providing constructive feedback for senior designers or extensive guidance for junior designers, my experience throughout the design lifecycle enables individual designers to work quickly in their areas of strength and grow their skills and careers with expert guidance.
I’ve designed websites in financial services, e-commerce, manufacturing, fashion, media, higher education, and government. Clients and employers have included:
I’ve grown from hand-coding accessible, standards-compliant websites as a teenager to leading teams at award-winning agencies and a Fortune 500 company. This is how each stop in my journey has contributed to my career.
Working as an in-house design leader required me to solve deep problems and steward a product through its evolution. What I learned from my agency experience leading projects and teams in a gamut of industries was the ability to delineate scope and recognize patterns – skills that enable me to solve problems quickly and effectively in any setting.
At the beginning of my career, I could code a website that looked good, loaded quickly, complied with web standards, and was accessible. However, as I began to understand the difference between a website that looked good and a website that is good, I wanted more tools to make websites better – and I found them in the growing field of user experience design. I made the transition in 2009 and haven’t looked back.
My undergraduate studies in studio art included years of critique: where students shared their work with their classmates and opened themselves up to questions. Questions ranged from the conceptual foundations to the technical execution, and being successful in critique meant demonstrating a mastery of one’s own work. My ability to consider every decision about the intent and outcome of a design was honed in this setting, and it continues to be an important part of my own design practice and how I cultivate a design team’s dedication to craft and accountability.
Anticipating shifts in technology requires more than wireframes and deliverables. It requires insight into how some technologies have taken hold (and others haven’t). To make websites better, I sought to understand the history of web browsers – and how it affected the ways the web went from a 20th-century curiosity to 21st-century infrastructure. I sought to understand how the evolution of the web affected the limits of what I could do as a web designer and how design on the web became possible in the first place. This curiosity remains central to my practice, even as my design scope extends beyond the web.
I have been fortunate to have mentors throughout my career who’ve invested in my professional success. I am constantly inspired by their effect on me to pay it forward to the designers I manage.
Numerous additional references available upon request.
Matthew is one of those rare people who use both sides of his brain equally well…He designs top notch user experiences that provide business value and a rewarding experience for the user.
Kit Unger, SVP Design, Mural
Matthew is a staunch advocate for the end user and he excels at making order out of chaos.
Rishi Kumar, Director of Product, REVOLT
Matthew excels as a design manager and is more than capable of directing UX agendas from a technical perspective.
Tsekwi Simoyi, Lead Front-End Developer, Nasdaq
It’s rare to have a manager as thoughtful, respectful, and knowledgable as Matthew.
Katie Baligod, Director of User Experience, tomorrow
Working for Matthew is an education in design.
Elaine Matthias, Product Designer, Northwestern Mutual
