# Elliot Sather > Creative product design and development leader. Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/elliotsather I am a design engineering leader with 20 years of experience working in multidisciplinary teams to understand and balance user needs, technical challenges, manufacturability, sustainability, and business constraints to bring meaningful products to market quickly. ## Work Experience ### Principal Mechanical Engineer / Engineering Manager @ Abbott Jan 2024 – Present | Alameda, California, United States ### Engineering Studio Principal and Partner @ Ronin Product Development Labs Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco, California, United States • Built and lead a studio of seven mechanical design and electromechanical engineers. • Responsible for team leadership and mentorship and technical oversight of project work. • Built relationships with strategic business partners to accelerate business growth and add value for our clients. • Acted as Studio Principal, Project Manager, and Technical Lead, on simultaneous projects. • Helped clients tackle their biggest engineering challenges, explore new technologies, and bring their new products from concept to production quickly. ### Product Development Consultant @ Elliot Sather Product Development Jan 2013 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco, CA Independent consultant leading clients through the product development process from start to finish including customer research, product specification, concept generation, design engineering, prototyping, and testing through to production ramp support. Mentored startups and guided them through the new product development process. • Provided cross-functional program integration support working closely with management, marketing, industrial design, electrical engineering, quality, regulatory, manufacturing, operations and supply chain. • Coordinated project teams and resources on product introduction projects to produce high performance, fully functional, tested, compliance-ready products in budget and on time. • Advised client management teams to help set company's strategic design direction. ### Sr. Mechanical Product Design Engineer @ Square Inc. Jan 2011 – Jan 2013 Designed and developed beautiful, reliable, high-volume, and low-cost mobile credit card readers and brought them to high-volume production. Product Design Lead on current and future card reader products. ### Senior R&D Engineer @ Ventus Medical Jan 2006 – Jan 2011 I led an interdisciplinary team including R&D, marketing, quality assurance, and supply chain/manufacturing in the development of the next generation of Ventus’ Medical's novel respiratory therapy device. My duties included ideating device concepts to meet clinical and market needs, prototyping device concepts including creating CAD models and drawings and interacting with prototyping vendors, conducting user research, developing test methods, protocols and fixtures, performing validation and verification testing, analyzing data and presenting results, supporting clinical studies and working closely with supply chain and manufacturing to bring devices to production. ### Product Design Engineer @ IDEO Jan 2004 – Jan 2006 As a member of multidisciplinary design teams working on a variety of design, engineering and manufacturing projects my responsibilities included user research, concept generation, prototyping, plastic and sheet metal part design, and documentation for production tooling. Project areas included consumer electronics, aerospace, medical devices and packaging. ### Lecturer @ Stanford University Jan 2004 – Jan 2006 Co-instructed ME101: Visual Thinking, a core undergraduate course in design engineering, visual thinking, rapid prototyping, sketching and the design process. ### Product Designer @ Sparkfactor Design Jan 2003 – Jan 2004 While acting as an on-site consultant supporting client engineering teams on a variety of design, engineering and manufacturing projects my responsibilities included concept generation, plastic and sheet metal part design, and documentation for tooling (SolidWorks and Unigraphics). Clients included Apple and One & Co. ### Product Designer @ Speck Design Jan 2000 – Jan 2001 I worked as a designer and engineer on several high-end telecom chassis and consumer electronics projects for clients and on several internal speculative consumer electronics projects. Challenges included understanding thermal design and EMI shielding on internet backbone routers, understanding manufacturing constraints on complex sheetmetal parts, and finding ways to extend clients’ core technologies into future generations of products through user observation. ## Education ### BS in Engineering: Product Design Stanford University ### MSE in Product Design Stanford University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/elliotsather - Portfolio: http://www.elliotsatherpd.com/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/elliotsather JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/elliotsather/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13