# Ben Dedrick > Product Design Lead Location: New York, New York, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/bendedrick Hi! I'm Ben, an NYC-based product designer with a penchant for collaborative problem-solving. I specialize in distilling clarity from sticky, "deep" UX problems, with much of my work steeped in product strategy, information architecture, and interaction design. I'm a firm believer that leadership is its own craft, and I'm looking to continue developing it within a diverse culture that views design as an important driver of strategy. Contact me for an up-to-date portfolio. ## Work Experience ### Staff Product Designer @ CNN Jan 2023 – Present | New York, New York, United States Design lead for CNN's Ad Experience team. Design owner for new original ad products, as well as the reconciliation and redesign of existing ad placements across desktop and mobile web. Direct manager to a junior designer. ### Product Design Lead: Music Ad Formats and Ad ML @ Spotify Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | New York, New York, United States - Led a team of three designers through far-future explorations of how we might drive monetization and engagement across Spotify’s most provocative new features. This work forged new relationships across product teams, improving our ability to ship well-crafted ad experiences in sync with new core features. (Case study available.) - Design owner for efforts to improve our ad experience via machine learning. Structured and prioritized workstreams for a squad of ML engineers using data-driven rationale. Work here focused on defining useful ML signals, introducing new forms of listener feedback, and broadening signal collection to more markets. - Design owner for Music CTA Cards, a new ad format that supported Spotify’s launch of an auction-based ad sales model by improving our lower-funnel metrics without disrupting listener experience. - Co-planned and facilitated Spotify’s “Design Bootcamp,” a quarterly onboarding program for new company-wide design hires. Developed activities aimed at helping new joiners more quickly build a sense of community and belonging at Spotify, as well as an understanding of the company’s structure and design’s ways of working. - Trained senior designers for candidate interviews and design exercise facilitation. - Provided regular mentorship through Spotify Design’s Screen Share program, a recurring event aimed at connecting BIPOC designers to established industry professionals in order to create new pathways to career success. ### Design Tribe Lead (Interim) / Senior Product Designer: Messaging @ Spotify Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | Greater New York City Area - Served as tribe lead for design, representing a team of five designers working across a 70-person tribe to build Spotify’s next-gen lifecycle messaging platform, for a period of five months. 
I was a dotted-line manager to the team, with responsibility for team health, tracking work, clearing obstacles, and representing the needs of design upward during annual planning. - Led the end-to-end redesign of Quicksilver, Spotify’s lifecycle messaging platform and our tribe’s core product. This internal tool is used by hundreds of Spotifiers to configure global listener- and artist-targeted campaigns across push, email, and in-app messaging formats, with yearly message impressions exceeding 24 billion. (Case study available.) - For this project, I partnered with user research to provide initial problem definition; designed and socialized a new information architecture; led a team of five designers as a player-coach through early design phases, including as sprint facilitator; and delivered high fidelity designs for several key surfaces. - The new Quicksilver drove increases of +130% message volume, +170% experiment volume, and 2x message use case diversity, with an average message CTR 30-50% higher than industry averages. - Redesigned internal tooling used by Spotify’s marketing operators to build email creatives as part of their messaging campaigns. The new creative editor substantially reduced task completion times for operators and improved brand consistency in our messaging. ### Senior Product Designer @ Salesforce.org Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | Greater New York City Area - Lead designer for the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), the leading CRM solution for nonprofit companies of all sizes. - Completed end-to-end design for Batch Gift Entry, one of NPSP's most robust original features. Process included early generative research, user flows, interaction design/prototyping, and final high-fidelity mocks. - Redesigned NPSP's in-product landing page to give users resources for starting their initial journey with Salesforce. - Lead designer for a brand-new product in Advancement, supporting alumni relationship management in the higher education space. - Designed and gave strategic direction for Advancement's Gift Processing capabilities, a suite of tools for efficiently capturing alumni donation data. - Drove user research efforts and requirements definition for Donor View, a set of optimizations that surfaces key data about donor behavior to the university advancement officers who need it most. - Provided design oversight and explorations for Volunteerforce, a tool that connects employees to volunteer opportunities and charitable organizations that match their interests. ### Consultant — User Experience Designer @ Slalom Consulting Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco, CA UX research, strategy, and design for enterprise solutions as well as consumer-facing products. Project contributions have spanned user research and product strategy through interaction design, wireframing, and final visuals. Clients include VMware, PG&E, McKesson, Kaiser Permanente, Genentech, Constellation Brands, Athleta, SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill), Gap, Salesforce.org, and others. For case studies and more details about my work, see my portfolio at http://www.bendedrick.com ### Student — User Experience Design Immersive @ General Assembly Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | San Francisco, CA Student of General Assembly's UX Design Immersive program. The course entailed ten weeks of full-time instruction as well as four complete design projects, from user research and sketching to wireframing and interactive prototyping. ### Quality Engineer @ Adobe Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | San Francisco - Conducted daily black box testing for Google Chrome's new plugin API across Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS platforms as a member of the Adobe Flash Runtime team. - Performed automated and manual test suites at smoke, acceptance, and final release certification levels for six major Flash Player release cycles, ensuring a reliable product for 500M+ users. - Wrote hundreds of bug and performance issue reports during testing and determined issue priority and severity status ratings for plugin and computer crashes, UI errors, and Stage3D performance issues. - Resolved bugs and performance issues in coordination with Flash Runtime and Google Chrome developers. ### Case Manager @ Crestwood Behavioral Health, Inc. Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | San Jose, CA - Conducted psychosocial assessments and created treatment plans for over 100 psychiatric patients. - Secured residential placement and outpatient mental health follow-up services for hundreds of patients in coordination with dozens of treatment centers, hospitals, shelters, care homes, and case management teams. - Represented the facility in biweekly legal hearings, and made case presentations before hearing Officers arguing for the extension of patient legal holds based on demonstrated behavior. - Created institutional patient placement and outpatient service policies used by future case management staff. ### Intensive Services Coordinator @ Crestwood Behavioral Health, Inc. Jan 2009 – Jan 2011 | San Jose, CA - Created and revised quarterly action plans for fifteen legally conserved clients with pending felony offenses suffering from serious mental illness while complying with all state and federal guidelines. - Consolidated 200 pages of legal guidelines into the Intensive Services program, and created relevant worksheets, outlines, and training manuals, enabling the facility to market itself to counties with specialized "Murphy" conservatorship cases. ## Education ### Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, Intensive Focus University of California, Santa Cruz Jan 2007 – Jan 2009 ### User Experience Design Immersive General Assembly Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 ### Psychology De Anza College Jan 2004 – Jan 2007 ### Leland High School Jan 2000 – Jan 2004 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ben-dedrick - Portfolio: http://www.bendedrick.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/bendedrick JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/bendedrick/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-30