# Mike Neff

> Product + design leader for complex and technical workflows. Formerly UserTesting, Lightstep, Mode.

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/mikeneff

I am a product and design leader with 15+ years experience across product design, product, brand, communications, and people management.

I'm passionate about building teams inspired by repeatably designing and shipping impactful products and services.

Specialties: Design leadership, product strategy, design strategy, outcomes-based work, data-informed design and decision making, product design, UX design, service design, design systems, prototyping, generative user research, usability testing, creative and art direction, identity design.

## Work Experience
### Head of Product + Product Design @ Duckbill
Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States
Building Skyway: A suite of tools to empower enterprises operating in the cloud.

### Advisor @ Conversa
Jan 2021 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco, California, United States
Advising on business models, partnerships, personnel, product, product design, experimentation, brand.

### Fractional Head of Design @ neff.studio
Jan 2023 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco, California, United States
Helping SaaS software companies:
- Rapidly find product market fit.
- Identify business opportunities by understanding their users' workflows and pains.
- Make better decisions more quickly by synthesizing ideas and making them concrete through design artifacts.

Select clients: Ironclad, Cleric, BlueBirds, Credit Sesame

### Director, Head of Product Design @ UserTesting
Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States
Responsible for all customer-facing experiences, working through design managers and staff-level ICs. Leveraging design system, machine learning, and partnerships to deliver delightful experiences to customers where they work. Led design for key company initiatives including HIPAA compliance, customer retention.

### Senior Manager, Product Design @ UserTesting
Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco, California, United States
Led design for Customer Group. Reestablished Design System team to drive consistent, performant and accessible experience. Identified team needs, recruited, and retained designers and design managers to support company growth goals in service of going public. Led design for key company initiatives including pricing and packaging, internationalization.

### Product Design Consultant @ neff.studio
Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area
Supporting tech companies including Ironclad

### Director of Design @ LightStep
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco, California

### Senior Product Design Manager @ LightStep
Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco, California
Growing the design team and adapting our practice in step with team and company growth. Hiring, staffing, headcount planning, codification and sharing of design practices all contributed to success.

### Senior Product Designer @ LightStep
Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area
First full-time designer. Creating a Product Design practice while acting as a design lead on IC projects. This was achieved by making design work more accessible to the company, recurring design critique, user research, and mentorship.

### Senior Product Designer @ Mode
Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area
As the 2nd designer at Mode I acted as design lead on every project I worked on including strategy, discovery research, information architecture, wireframing, prototyping, user testing, UI design, interaction design, CSS, icon design, animation, product and project management.

Design leadership: Mentored more junior designers and collaborated with senior designers to create, document, and socialize the design team's processes, projects, and tools. Lead efforts to create Mode's first design system in collaboration with engineering.

Lead design of:
- External sharing: Flexible system for embedding, emailing, and Slack sharing Mode reports
- Definitions: The ability to encapsulate SQL then call it like a function
- Drag and drop report layout
- Github integration
- Report theming
- Self-service billing
- TV dashboard display
- WYSIWYG report editing

### Advisor @ Meerchant
Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco, California
Acquired by ShopKeep, a leading cloud POS vendor.

### Director of Design @ Homebase
Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco, California
As the founding designer and 1st employee, I lead product and communications design for this SaaS HR platform. Designing for an ecosystem of a web app, native iOS and Android tablet apps, and native iOS and Android mobile apps, used by SMBs for timekeeping, scheduling and analytics products tied to their sales data, as well as mobile apps for hourly employees to communicate with managers, trade shifts, and understand their earnings.

Product design in this role included user research, IA, UX and UI design, documentation, and user testing. Comms design included a full rebrand, art direction and copywriting of app store content, product marketing, activation marketing, marketing funnel design and optimization, and creation of sales training and leave-behind materials. The product team was distributed across many time zones so clear, asynchronous communication was key to success.


## Education
### Rhode Island School of Design

### Brown University


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/michaelneff
- Website: https://michaelneff.com/design/portfolio

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Source: https://flows.cv/mikeneff
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/mikeneff/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-05