My name is Brent Otterlei and I am a user experience design professional with 15+ years of experience.
2019 — Now
Pleasanton, California
San Francisco, California
The core app experience lead was responsible for all current and new features in the app and web responsive app outside of the on-boarding experience. So everything after you create an account was what I was responsible for.
Highlights
Took design projects from inception and initial research through Ideation, synthesis, iteration, prototyping, participation in user testing to completion in high fidelity designs
Collaborated with Design research, Marketing, Legal and Compliance, Product, Engineering, Data and Customer Support
Participated and helped lead design sprints, design corners review and feedback sessions.
Leveraged design systems and established new design patterns for the mobile and web apps
Participated in user studies and user testing
Tools
Pencil and sketchbook - Notes and initial concepts
Figma - Design and collaboration
Principle - Prototyping
Reason for leaving
John Hancock hired a new leadership team in Boston and decided to change their direct to consumer strategy which unfortunately did not include Twine so they closed down our office and laid the everyone off even though we were growing rapidly.
San Francisco Bay Area
Lead Product Designer for the Sam’s Club mobile e-commerce app. This app was on iPhone, iPad, Android tablets and phones and did about $1m a day in transactions when I left.
Highlights
Responsible for all mobile design for Sam’s Club
Took design projects from inception though completion for all supported platforms (iPhone, iPad, Android tablet and phone)
Collaborated with Research, product, engineering and branding
Presented projects to CEO and VP of Product before Engineering handoff
Led brainstorming and review sessions with the broader design team to help foster collaboration
Frequently ordered items project I worked on resulted in a $37M annualized GMV (3% bump in total app GMV)
Tools
Pencil and sketchbook - Notes and initial concepts
Sketch and Zeplin - Design and collaboration
InVision and React Native - Prototyping
Reason for leaving
I really enjoyed the problems we were trying to solve at Walmart Labs (Sam’s Club org) and the opportunity for my design work to reach a massive audience and have a massive impact on business but the lack of a good design culture, work life balance and toxic team members led me to believe it was not worth the 4 1/2 hour round trip commute so I decided to move on.
San Francisco Bay Area
As a Design Manager at Verifone I had a 90/10 split of Product Design work to Design Management. I led a small design team (one junior designer) and a handful of designers from a design agency called Momentum. We were tasked with the enormous job of designing an entire B to B to C payments ecosystem for big banks to sell and SMEs to use in brick and mortar stores. Having such a small team and such a large mandate I designed and implemented new processes, introduced new tools and championed a design system to help optimize design workflows, increase design velocity while keeping a high quality of design.
Highlights
Team designed an Android payment terminal app, App Store app, web based admin tools for payment terminal management and in store payments management from inception through implementation.
Created new design processes and championed the use of new design tools like Sketch, Zeplin, Framer, etc
Created a design system using ATOMIC Design and worked with engineering to get buy in and get it implemented to reduce design load.
Managed a small team and a design agency with ~5 other designers
Presented UX vision for the new mobile payments ecosystem to the CEO and board and got approval to move forward
Reason for leaving
Unfortunately after a year and a half working towards realization of the commerce platform Verifone went through a re-org and laid off the team.
2013 — 2015
Redwood City, Ca
I was one of the founding members (Employee 2) for Clip a payments start up focusing on bringing a broader credit card acceptance in Mexico. I spent the first year and a half working on both UX strategy and implementation of that strategy end to end using design thinking and once we received larger amounts of funding I was able to build and lead a design team.
Highlights
I was both Head of Design and Lead Designer for the first year and a half until we received enough funding to build up the team.
Created UX strategy and vision
Designed UX processes
Managed an internal design team and external design, IxD, branding and packaging agencies.
Helped take Clip from concept through implementation as a mobile payments app experience that lived on iOS, Android and Windows Phones.
Reason for leaving
As Clip grew bigger the decision was made to grow the team in Mexico and stop growing in the US which meant I would have to travel more. This was not ideal while starting a new family so I had to say goodbye. Clip is still going strong just recently voted one of the top 5 startups to work for in Mexico and just closed a $100M C round.
Education
Academy of Art University
MFA
San José State University
BA
San José State University