# Angel Steger > VP of Design at Wealthfront, Investor, Advisor Location: Oakland, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/angelsteger What got me into tech was a simple question, "How would you like to work on a product that has 100M users?" As an architect, I immediately thought, "I'll never make a building like that." What has kept me in tech has been seeing the impact of that work: for the people who use our products, for the way that transforms into business success, and for how we've learned what to do (or not do) in order to get there. It has been humbling and inspiring. Tech doesn’t just change ability the way a hammer changes the capacity of a human arm. It transforms people and society by fundamentally altering our mindset around what is possible. It changes our aspirations. This ability to unlock human capability and behavior is incredibly powerful in organizations and products. When you apply this to problems that affect everyday people, the scope of impact is huge. Take the areas of relationship management, finance, wellness, and analytics. They cross boundaries, are deeply entangled in human behavior and motivation, and are foundational to functioning society. Since 2006, I’ve been a hybrid design and product leader focused on strategic thinking and execution. I’ve worked at seed round through IPO, from small to large companies, serving from hundreds to billions of people who used our products. To learn more about my approach and philosophy, start with the First Round Capital piece, "Defining Growth Design" (ranked #18 of "The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2019"), or check out past talks/articles in the projects/publications section. ## Work Experience ### VP of Design @ Wealthfront Jan 2023 – Present | Palo Alto, California, United States Building a financial system that favors people, not institutions. • 2024 Investopedia Best Robo-Advisor • 2024 Forbes 50 Hottest Fintech Startups • 2024 Real Simple Smart Money Award Best Robo-Advisor ### Advisor @ Ameelio Jan 2020 – Present | New Haven, Connecticut, United States Helping incarcerated people stay in touch with loved ones for free. • Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Companies of 2023 • 2023 Winner Fast Company's 10 Most Innovative Nonprofits (#8) • 2021 Winner Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Award for Social Justice. ### Advisor @ AudiencePlus Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco Bay Area Building software, content, and community to help every company become a media company • 2024 Revgenius Next 50 GTM Startups ### Director Of Product Design @ Meta Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | Menlo Park, California, United States Helping people meaningfully connect online with the folks they care about across devices and apps. Supporting key projects and teams that span the family of apps (e.g. Instagram, Messenger, Facebook, Reality Labs), multi-year cross-org and app-level strategy initiatives, ongoing discovery and development in pre and post-product-market-fit stages, cultivating innovative and healthy teams. ### Advisor @ Switchboard Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area Innovative realtime communication and collaboration platform. • 2023 Winner Fast Company's 10 Most Innovative Companies in Enterprise (#10) • 2022 Innovation of the Year Winner, Time Magazine, Productivity Category ### Director of Product Design, Customer Growth & Business Platform Groups @ Dropbox Jan 2017 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco, California Director of Product Design for two cross-functional groups: Customer Growth (customer lifecycle) and Business Platform (payments, experimentation tools, GTM platform), team of 4 design managers and 19 product designers (grown from 6 ICs) across 2 offices Led cultural change in role of Design from execution arm to strategic partner in setting direction and taking bigger swings: • Dropbox website overhaul: Technical, architectural, and content overhaul of the website to unlock performance of the customer acquisition funnel. Pitched to leadership and built a shared vision among previously fractured teams. Planned, staffed, built and executed. • Dropbox’s Fall 2019 pivot (Smart Workspace): Drove design-led process that prioritized adapting entire user flows based on launch impact. Tight timeframe, high-risk work to create cross-company initiative to deliver high-quality experience on time, met all success metrics. • Trials Platform: Devised front-end platform concept, which in V1 allowed Dropbox to deliver new SKU trial in 3x faster, with an estimated savings of $1-2m in human hours per launch, and potential to ship 12x faster in subsequent iterations. Leadership in company-level cultural priorities: Co-lead of Women@ (~450 members) • Built up consolidated views of values and hot spots for women at Dropbox, worked with leadership to address high impact areas, e.g. sponsoring attendance of Grace Hopper, building inclusive behavior into leveling and meeting best practices. Drove exec sponsorship of unconscious bias training, referred selected vendor to L&D, consulted on deployment, and worked with People team to focus on efficacy. • Launched Women@ Mentorship Circles program (40 women per class, now starting 4th class) • Hosted company-wide events featuring Condoleeza Rice, Valerie Jarrett, Kara Swisher, with special fireside chats with senior women in leadership at Dropbox. ### Design Mentor @ Designlab (trydesignlab.com) Jan 2014 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area Developing effective product designers through critique, career coaching, and mentorship. ### Product Design Lead, Growth @ Pinterest Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area Product Design Lead for multiple cross-functional growth teams: Virality & Collaboration, Notifications & Engagement, New User Experience, User State Machine (post-28-day activation); grew the user base from <100m to 250+m; led 4 product designers across multiple teams. Led cultural shift towards leveraging design, analytics and research to drive value comprehension and lasting habits • Virality: Overhauled tracking to ensure clear baseline, remade invites and sending, set up multiple experiments—leading to 8x sending volume and increased send propensity. • Engagement: Rebuilt entire notifications system (~150 templates) from single fire to intelligent aggregation to better align to product value for casual users (~30% sessions driven only through notifications) leading to increasing engagement with notifications over time. • Activation: drove redesign of core pinning flow to be more self-explanatory and stateful for new and at-risk users, increasing activation rate and product value comprehension • User State Machine: set logged-in SEO-based landing page strategy (majority of sessions start here) and drove longer sessions and deeper content exploration; set re-activation strategy which led to resurrected users re-activating at the same rate as new users and exposed them to new use cases (2 patents pending) Scaling growth best practices across Pinterest: partnered with experimentation platform engineering team: • Defined healthy default states, design system, and tracking for all experimentation front-end components, including cool-down rates and dismissal • Ensured teams with less experience could leverage experimentation best practices, reducing risk of experience breakages. Leadership in design-wide cultural activities: co-founded Women In Creative • Managed programming; recruited presenters; hosted workshops on topics such as salary negotiation, inner critic, how to find mentors, and pitching ideas; hosted dinners and fireside chats with senior women leaders ### Product + Design Cofounder @ Colingo Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | San Francisco Bay Area Directing product management and design to rethink conversational language learning via Android and the web for students from 180+ countries. Worked with CEO, 3-person engineering team, contract designer, and 30+ teaching staff. Developed updated product experience and contributed to curriculum with high engagement: • Focused on meaningful content and charismatic, native-speaking instructors (why they join) who could facilitate connection between students (why they stay)—leading to over 50% of customers spending 5+ hours per week in classes Drove efforts that defined the target customer and their needs: • Led market positioning and user research in São Paolo to understand how the market thought about learning English, what would engage them, what they’d pay for, why the incumbent solutions weren’t working, co-design, test prototypes • Led user research in Seoul to understand learner mindset, motivation, preferred platforms, test prototypes Partnered with CEO on pivot to more scalable business model leveraging apps and community engagement: • Ran FB ad campaigns in Mexico to recruit and test non-branded Android app prototype for signal on interest and engagement around driving meaningful conversations • Collaborated with CEO on company pivot to chatbot + teacher combo based on research conducted on Californians with similar dependencies on Spanish, designed & tested interactive prototypes leveraging Google text-to-speech and speech-to-text APIs to build confidence in new directions. External presence • Mentor for Kstartup (Seoul-based incubator) ### Design Strategy @ Independent Consultant Jan 2007 – Jan 2013 | San Francisco Brand strategy, identity, research, and product design for mobile, tablet, and web for early-stage startups. Clients include Zumper, 23andMe, and Xoopit. ### Product Manager, Design Lead @ Xobni Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 | San Francisco Bay Area Product & Design Lead for Smartr Inbox for Gmail, Out-of-Box Experience, Xobni for Teams, mobile apps, and Xobni Website. Worked with cross-functional teams including product marketer, product designer, QA engineer, 8-12 engineers Driving vision alignment across the company: • Led Xobni rebrand in partnership with product marketing and design to identify target customers, unpack their core motivations and mindset • Led Outlook client re-design to better snap to customer expectations Building towards future success: • Led Smartr Inbox for Gmail from private alpha through GA, launched complete on press date, product was an omnipresent reference for users (4/5 users kept the tray open all the time) • Led transition to cloud inbox analytics: departed from existing client-side technical approach and required everything to be calculated and stored in the cloud—enabling data to be scaled and accessed across all devices and reducing load on client devices • Granted two patents for automatically generating a relationship context and group autosuggest in partnership with CTO Peter Monaco • Partnered with senior engineer on algorithms for auto-detecting address book information within emails; developed logic for how users can edit an automatically generated address book after research revealed edge cases where users had strong emotional needs to override the algorithms, e.g. how to read signal implicitly and when to explicitly ask for clarification. • Stripped out 80% of analytics calculated on Outlook client based on analytics and customer interviews, leading to significant improvements in app size and stability and reducing load on users’ local machines (more memory, longer battery life)—a key issue for existing users • Worked on partnerships: Samsung, Orange, Cisco, and more ### Product Lead, Ancestry @ 23andMe Jan 2008 – Jan 2010 | Mountain View, CA First product designer (and later PM) for the world's first consumer genomics platform for self-discovery and the advancement of science. Working alongside scientists, engineers, customer support, writers, illustrators, legal, community, and more to deliver the 23andMe marketing and in-product experience. Bringing a user-centered mindset to consumer genomics: • Conceived, designed and shipped customer testimonials feature to help build confidence in the value of a product new to market • Brought safety to the fear of surprise health discoveries: redesigned the “first results reading” experience to calm emotions by slowing people down, leading to more accurate and safe results interpretation by customers and reducing business risk • Brought safety to the fear of surprise family discoveries: designed and launched Relative Finder, a tool to find genetic relatives in the 23andMe database • Designed and launched Ancestry Painting, simple and advanced data visualizations of the geographic origins of one’s ancestry Launched 23andWe, the world’s first online genetic research platform: • Created survey strategy of focusing on offering value to incentivize behavior through accessible self-discovery metrics, highly interactive feedback style, playful imagery, and auto-loading of back-to-back surveys. Outcomes: for a set of ~20 single question surveys, if a user completed one survey, they had an 80% chance of completing all 20 surveys. • Designed longitudinal surveys on Pregnancy and Parkinson’s disease to deal with sensitive emotional and physical ability needs in collaboration with pm and user research. • Impact: 23andMe was able to produce a number of scientific research papers combining genotype and phenotype, scaled from a much more diverse gene pool than traditional genetics research and validating its position as a real research institution. ### Web Interface Designer @ Fox Interactive Media Jan 2006 – Jan 2007 | Greater Los Angeles Area First designer to ever touch a MySpace product. Newroo was the first team to successfully integrate with MySpace. Owned design strategy and output for personalized news aggregation service, MySpace News. Team comprised of 6 people across engineering, product, and design. Developed strategic role for design by synthesizing across different business needs • Designed personalized newsfeed for new user profile pages and separate news vertical pages—both of which could be monetized for top quality ads and sponsorships (e.g. dress your MySpace profile with art from 50 Cent’s new album, Sports vertical sponsored by Nike), addressing MySpace’s monetization problem of only being able to capture remnant ad inventory. • Created designs emphasizing stability/consistency for MySpace’s Head of Engineering (focused on scalability) • Created designs emphasizing personal expression, personalization, and ad monetization capability for Tom Anderson & Chris De Wolfe (focused on the future). Designed experience to engage MySpace’s broad demographics: • Developed image-based news browsing experience to cater to MySpace audience, including partnering with engineering to smooth/crop images to capture/flatter human faces • “Link Sidebar” to easily browse related aggregated content while viewing a source news article • 5-star rating interaction system that helped users understand what stars mean (addresses use cases such as “How should I rate a great article about a terrible event?” or “How do I rate a bad article about a topic I love?”) ### Graphic Designer @ Aftermodern LLC Jan 2005 – Jan 2006 • Designed Aftermodern graphic identity: logo, business cards, forms, and letterhead • Developed ad campaigns for international arts magazines, online media, and print materials. • Collaborated with Managing Director to assess art talent, coordinate exhibitions, and manage relationships with artists and patrons ### Architecture Internship @ Obra Architects Jan 2004 – Jan 2004 Designing a retired architect's residence located on a vineyard at the base of the Andes mountains in Argentina. Due to the remote location, the design leverages local building traditions and sustainable materials such as adobe brick, eucalyptus beam, and reed construction. This enables the building to be affordably built and maintained via local construction workers. Responsibilities: • Re-making the footprint of the house while preserving essential qualities & character • Designing layout of roof beam support system using local materials • Generating technical and presentation drawings • Designing, lasercutting, and building detailed model with removable roof and floor panels. Model is constructed using the same building methods as the actual house. • Designing and building site model to convey location relative to geographic features in the environment Read more about the project here: http://www.obraarchitects.com/work/0403CasaenlaFinca/0403CasaenlaFinca.html ## Education ### Bachelor of Architecture - BArch in Architecture Rhode Island School of Design ### Dropbox Summit in Business Administration and Management, General Stanford University Graduate School of Business ### Mandarin Chinese Brown University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/angelsteger - Portfolio: https://www.angelsteger.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/angelsteger JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/angelsteger/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13