Transformation Strategy

Every project is
a promise.

And it starts with alignment: getting business priorities, team capabilities, and product realities pointed toward a shared goal. I make the direction tangible, translating strategy into things people can see, test, and act on. Alignment allows us to extend and accelerate, turning shared direction into decisive action.

Areas of expertise: Business & customer alignment · Product definition & validation · Complex ecosystems · AI-enabled prototyping

Toolbox:
Case studies Get in touch

What I Believe.

People don't stay because a product is cheapest or most powerful—they stay when it reflects who they are. Product loyalty is covenantal; the brand promises to reflect audience values and beliefs, and the audience responds with dedication and trust. My teams align promises with expectations, creating relationships that last.

I came to that belief honestly: through fifteen authored books on design, an MFA from Bard, a fellowship from Yale, and years building practices from scratch and running national organizations.

I can support engineering timelines and business pressure without letting design leave the conversation. I hold the room when it matters, and I still care how the work actually lands.

Results

If it didn’t move a number, what was it for?

196M+

Arity — Potential MAU reach across Experian, Alarm.com/ADT, and SiriusXM/Pandora SDK partnerships.

+280%

Champion Gaming — Subscriber growth after product, mobile, and subscription-funnel redesign

0–20

Wipro Digital — Founded the U.S. experience-design practice and grew it to roughly 20 people

6.1×

Sears Holdings — Email opens: 0.7% to 4.3%, our recommendation engine vs. Rich Relevance

Case Studies

Strategy in action

Three situations that map to where I work best: mobile and SDK products, early-stage growth, and enterprise platforms. How I read each one, and what I did about it.

Arity
Prototype gallery Working desktop prototypes built to demonstrate data integration and new-market use cases.
1/1 Click to expand

The Problem

Arity’s core business was built on insurance risk models. To expand into the high-stakes consumer finance and safety-app markets, the company needed to translate abstract telematics data into tangible product experiences that prospective partners like Experian and SiriusXM could actually see, understand, and buy.

The Approach

I led a dual-track experience strategy: building a plug-and-play mobile SDK for partner integration and a high-fidelity GTM prototyping engine for sales. The goal was to bridge the gap between “data science” and “human experience,” making the value of driving intelligence concrete for the C-suite.

The Method

I established a “destination-backed” design process that prioritized commercial viability. By partnering directly with Sales and GTM leadership, we identified high-value safety and finance use cases and manifested them through working prototypes. This allowed us to run “product-led” sales cycles where stakeholders could interact with realistic data models, drastically reducing the ambiguity of a new-market launch.

The Outcome

This strategy accelerated high-stakes partnerships with Experian, Alarm.com/ADT, and SiriusXM, representing a potential reach of 196 million monthly active users. We didn’t just build a demo; we built a testable model of Arity’s future in the consumer safety space, aligning internal product teams and external partners around a single, credible vision.

Champion Gaming
Product screens EdjSports and Football Outsiders on desktop and mobile. Click to browse all views.
Click to expand

The Problem

Champion Gaming had respected sports-intelligence products and a loyal expert audience, but growth had stalled. The experiences were dense, difficult for new users to enter, and inconsistent across content, analytics, subscription, desktop, and mobile touchpoints. The challenge was to broaden the audience without flattening the depth that serious fans and bettors valued.

The Approach

I rebuilt the subscription path by cutting steps, clarifying the value of each tier, and reducing friction between discovery and purchase. Across Football Outsiders and EdjSports, I reorganized the product experience so mobile users could reach a useful decision quickly while desktop users retained the analytical depth they expected. I also connected editorial, matchup data, predictive analytics, and wagering information into a more coherent product model.

The Outcome

Football Outsiders subscribers grew 280% and revenue increased 22% year over year. Across EdjSports, pageviews increased 206%, session duration rose 279%, and bounce rate fell 35%. The result was not simply more traffic: people understood the offering, stayed longer, and were more willing to subscribe.

NielsenIQ

The Problem

Nielsen was splitting in two — a $6B divestiture. The consumer intelligence side was becoming NielsenIQ, an independent company. The product portfolio was sprawling: over 100 enterprise applications built or acquired over decades, no shared design language, duplicated features everywhere, inconsistent branding. Thousands of global clients in CPG, retail, and media depended on these tools every day. All of it had to be rebranded and brought into alignment while the company was being torn in half.

The Approach

I led a 13-person UX organization with four direct-report managers. First I overhauled the design system — modular code snippets, flexible design tokens, a shared repository that worked from design through to front-end dev. Then I connected with my VP counterparts in branding and corporate marketing and proposed a cross-functional governance body I called the Nielsen Design Collective. The CMO approved it and we presented to the board. From there we audited the full product portfolio, ran weekly sessions over several months to communicate the new standards, answer questions, and hand off changes to local app teams. Final step was inspecting what we expected — signoffs, decisions on the outliers, and making sure it stuck.

The Outcome

The design-system overhaul was completed by mid-June. The Nielsen Design Collective received CMO approval and was presented to the board in July. Weekly rollout sessions continued through the fall, with final signoffs in January. In twelve months, 111 applications were reviewed and more than 100 launched under the NielsenIQ brand on schedule while the 13-person UX organization remained intact through the divestiture.

Design Examples

Process and outcomes

A closer look at how the work actually gets made — and the artifacts it leaves behind.

Synthesis dashboard — Jesse's Desk overview screen with category cards and key metrics
Design Workshop

Synthesis Turning enterprise data
into a decision workspace

A NielsenIQ workshop example showing how research, pre-work, team friction, concept development, and organizational alignment shaped a complex analytics product.

Practice

AI should raise the quality bar, not just move faster.

I’ve transformed the traditional Double Diamond into a Design-to-Deployment Engine. By integrating agentic AI pipelines into my craft, I’ve compressed the design-to-deployment cycle from weeks to days while significantly increasing the depth of exploration.

Key Milestones

High-Definition Inputs

Garbage in, garbage out. I start with deep contextual grounding.

Contextual Synthesis

Compressing the horizontal breadth of problem-framing.

Functional Artifacts

Expanding the vertical depth to ship testable code, not just mocks.

Explore my Agentic Design Practice

Approach

How I lead

What holds up, no matter where I go.

Align and extend

Every engagement starts the same way: get the business priorities, team capabilities, and product reality lined up before you commit to a direction. I've walked into a 111-application portfolio at Nielsen that had no standard, nine competing brand experiences at Foot Locker, three acquired studios at Publicis — and the first job is never "start designing." It's getting everyone pointed in the same direction.

Align, then extend

U.S. Bank

Wipro / US Bank

The problem: A transformation program worth tens of millions with one UX designer embedded downstream, and a March implementation start already on the calendar.

The move: Six weeks and $48K to build an experience model as proof that the product direction could hold.

The result: Delivered in late January, well received by the client, and converted into an approximately $3M, three-year UX/UI contract. My team delivered for roughly 12–18 months.

That is the pattern: align the business, team, and product reality first, then extend with confidence. When the direction is right, speed compounds instead of creating rework.

The organization has to outlast you

I don’t build organizations around a single leader. I build them around shared principles, clear operating models, and an understood reason for the work. At Wipro I founded the U.S. practice and grew it to roughly 20 people. At AOL I took a team of seven to roughly 55. At Rosetta I led 76 people across nine offices. When the principles and decision structures hold, the organization keeps moving whether I am there or not.

Career

Where I've been

2023 — 2026 Director, Design Lead Arity (Allstate) — Defined mobile SDK experience strategy and led GTM design for Arity’s expansion beyond insurance. The work included consent and permissions, embedded partner experiences, driver-behavior segmentation, and functional prototypes supporting opportunities with Experian, Alarm.com/ADT, and SiriusXM/Pandora.
2022 VP, User Experience GreenPark Sports — Joined as GreenPark’s first UX/experience leader, bringing product strategy and end-to-end interaction design to an organization that already had 3D design and engineering capabilities. Partnered with the CEO on a pivot toward mobile community voice chat, runway-focused restructuring, NBA licensing, and MLS supporter-group micro-networks.
2021 — 2022 VP, Product Design & Dev Champion Gaming — Led product design and growth strategy across Football Outsiders and EdjSports, rebuilding mobile and desktop experiences, information architecture, subscription, and sports-intelligence products. Subscribers grew 280% and revenue increased 22% year over year.
2019 — 2021 VP, User Experience NielsenIQ (Nielsen) — Led a 13-person UX organization through a $6B divestiture. The Nielsen Design Collective reviewed 111 applications and launched more than 100 under the new brand on schedule.
2017 — 2019 Senior Director, UX & Product Foot Locker — Built a 14-person product and UX organization across nine global retail brands and ran the testing program behind roughly 7% conversion improvement.
2014 — 2016 Digital Practice Partner Wipro Digital — Founded the U.S. experience-design practice and grew it to roughly 20 people. Reset a failing U.S. Bank engagement with a $48K proof of concept that secured a three-year, ~$3M contract.
2012 — 2013 SVP / Partner, CX Rosetta (Publicis Groupe) — Led UX nationally across 9 offices, 76 people. Unified UX culture across three acquired studios post-acquisition. ~25% pitch close rate across 43 presentations in the first year.
2008 — 2012 Director, Customer Experience Sears Holdings — Led UX for a strategic R&D group reporting to Chairman Eddie Lampert, building the experience layer for personalization, ecommerce, email, and the Sears Catalogue app. The broader program contributed to 20% online revenue growth while supporting a $41B store business.
2007 — 2008 Creative Director Razorfish (Microsoft) — Creative direction and eCommerce strategy for P&G, JC Penney, Navteq, DeVry. Key role in winning JC Penney's $25M AOR contract.
2006 — 2007 Interactive Creative Director Coldwater Creek — Led first site redesign in seven years for $1B retailer. +32% pageviews, reduced cart abandonment, 40% online conversion lift YOY. Grew design team 200%.
2001 — 2006 Director, Design AOL (Time Warner) — Defined the content and traffic strategy across Netscape, CompuServe, and AIM. Conceived the Netscape traffic catalyst that drove +4M monthly sessions to CNN. Grew team from 7 to roughly 55.

Let's talk about what you're building.

I’m open to VP and Director-level product design leadership roles, transformation mandates, and focused advisory engagements. If the organization’s ambition has moved beyond its current product experience, let’s talk about what needs to change.

dgiordan@mac.com LinkedIn