# Erica Rider > Product, UX, and DesignOps thought leader. Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/ericarider An accomplished product and UX leader well seasoned designing SaaS, web, mobile, and desktop applications for consumer and enterprise users. A creative minded professional with a track record for finding innovative, simple, and technically achievable solutions to complex problems. ## Work Experience ### Sr Manager, Product Design @ Backblaze Jan 2024 – Present ### Product Design Lead @ Backblaze Jan 2023 – Present ### Sr Manager Product and Design - Developer tools and platform experience @ PayPal Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | San Jose, California, United States • Drove the transition of an engineering driven org to a customer focused org by Evangelizing design thinking across product teams to enable them to successfully deliver useful and useable product to the internal developer community at PayPal. • Recruited and hired key team members and manage global team of cross functional designers • Formalized and evangelized a UX process we called DesignOps 2.0. DesignOps2.0 scaled design process and technologies, enabling a team of 4 designers to successfully support 50 different products and over 1000 developers while delivering a cohesive and consistent story across products. • Led team from concept to design to production of a developer platform that supports over 7k unique developers a month. ### Product and UX Design lead - PayPal Developer console @ PayPal Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | San Jose, California • Created design process that enabled products to go from initial concept to functioning prototype to Collecting user feedback and refinement in a single sprint. 300% faster than traditional design models. • Removed ambiguity around design decisions, enabling a consistent and cohesive user experience at scale. • Prototypes built with all the same components used in production products. This removed the churn of developers trying to figure out how to translate pixel based mockups into real code. This resulted in teams ability to get to working code in a single sprint. ### UX Architect Cross Cloud Services @ VMware Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | Palo Alto, CA ### Product Architect - Advanced Development @ VMware Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Palo Alto Research design and prototype a virtual personal assistant for cloud administrators. The primary goal is to create a product that reduced time spent by cloud admins “putting out fires”  and optimize time spent working on long term projects.  • Research and design a product that naturally fits into a cloud admins life.  • Identified integration points with other products such as ticketing and project management systems. • Designed task management model to replace the cumbersome alerting model used in IT management systems • Provided a roadmap to transition from existing alerting system to task management. • Proposed using existing machine learning and analytics engine to build a UI that can learn and predict what is important to the user at any given point and dynamically build the UI based on users interest and current context. ### UX Architect / Tech Lead VROPS @ VMware Jan 2011 – Jan 2015 | Palo Alto Responsible for providing the user experience leadership across VMware's Management business unit as well as VMware’s suite of cloud monitoring products.  • Concurrently managed user experience goals and expectations for 3 successive product releases. • Set direction to integrate multiple products together into a single suite • Architected and drove to completion an integration plan between the vSphere and VCOps • Leading a small team of user experience designers researchers and contractors. • Mentor younger interaction designers. • Leading collaboration efforts with cross functional team • Leading collaboration efforts with the cross product user experience team. • Establishing best practices for the role of user experience in agile development in the business unit • Member of the user experience leadership team contributing to setting direction for the core UX team • User experience lead and evangelist, promoting consistency and maintaining open communication across multiple products, their stake holders and cross functional product teams. ### UX Lead Resource Management @ VMware Jan 2007 – Jan 2011 | Palo Alto CA Lead entire user experience effort for VMware core products: Clustering, Fault Tolerance, DRS, High Availability, and Resource Management.     • leading cross-functional teams to deliver products that focus on user experience at every stage, from early architecture to shipping product.     • Promote cross product consistency     • Maintain open communication across multiple products, their stake holders and cross functional product teams • Conceptualized, architected, designed user models and UI for multiple products.     • Storage DRS: mapped out long term multi release vision.     • User models that allow admins to manage 100+ servers + networks + storage devices as a single object.     • Tool for configuring complex server clustering providing both “One-Click Setup” and “Guided Setup” ### User Experience Designer @ eBay Jan 2006 – Jan 2007 | San Jose CA * Lead UI design of products affecting several user facing areas of eBay. * Present product concepts, strategies and designs to executive staff and business unit. * Lead product team to explore design options. * Collaborate with others designers to implement a constant user experience. * Work with product managers to develop product requirement documents. * Writing product specifications including: IA, work flow, page functionality and mock ups * Consult with product development to ensure the product is built according to specs. * Working with Product Manager to evaluate product success and next steps. ### Owner @ mayamo Jan 1996 – Jan 2007 ## Education ### n/a in Art and Design Apprenticeships ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/erider --- Source: https://flows.cv/ericarider JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/ericarider/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13