# Tim Rechin > Design leadership at SAP Location: San Carlos, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/timrechin I'm a design leader who can think big picture while executing the details to deliver product experiences that customers and users love. Over the last 20+ years, I've helped conceptualize and launch successful products at companies like Elance, eBay, Yahoo!, SAP/SuccessFactors, Mint (Intuit), Facebook, and Edmodo. Today, I'm leading a Core Design team responsible for crafting exceptional onboarding and continuous learning experiences across SAP cloud products. ## Work Experience ### Design Director, First Use & Nurture @ SAP Jan 2024 – Present | Palo Alto, California, United States ### Head of Product Design @ Workstream Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco Bay Area At Workstream, we're helping hourly businesses hire, onboard, engage, and pay their employees in an increasingly complex labor market. As the first design leader, I built a team seven designers and a user researcher to help us grow our Hiring and Onboarding products and expand into an All-in-One engagement platform with a focus on worker engagement and retention. To date, some of our highlights: · Established our user research function (operations, insights library, training resources, and multi-level research) · Established our first design system (process/governance, design/engg documentation and code repo) · Redesigned our information architecture and global navigation · Developed a concept car process used for sharing our product strategy and collecting feedback · Launched a new mobile app supporting a new worker experience · Designed AI features (chat to apply, voice to apply, job description optimizer) to improve application and time to hire success · Developed a product marketing playbook and standards for engaging our users with education, guides and product promotions · Launched new products critical to our company growth and customer success — I-9, e-verify, team records, document management, engagement surveys, chat, payroll, pto, shift scheduling, time and attendance, custom reporting, data export and custom fields, integrations (I9, eVerify, background checks) ### VP, Design and User Research @ Edmodo Jan 2016 – Jan 2021 | San Mateo, California As classroom tools were becoming more common, we wanted to find ways to connect the 100m+ teachers, students, parents and administrators using our products. As the new design leader I was tasked with building the first design and research team and partnering with the VP of Product to drive a new education community strategy. The first initiative I took on was to redesign our mobile app which was out of date and had major usability issues. My team and I partnered with our district adoption team to conduct user research, worked with engineering team to understand constraints and opportunities, and conducted a mobile audit and analysis to create a design backlog. In redesigning the app, we introduced a new style guide and reduced the overall screen count by introducing native mobile patterns. Each year we plan around a major back to school release. Over that time my team redesigned our core education tools — assignments, quizzes, grading, documents, and classroom management, introduced new features such as chat, class agendas, partner brand pages, partner integrations, community feed, and education resource sharing. This work not only grew our district adoption and user engagement but was an important business driver. As businesses and schools were affected during COVID, we suddenly experienced a growth spike as distant learning became a necessity. Through our parent company, NetDragon, we entered into a partnership with the country of Egypt to deliver distance learning solutions for their entire country. Over four months my team worked to understand the needs of our international users and worked with our adoption and product teams to redesign or build new features to support 22+ million students and 1+ million teachers. This work coordinated in a successful nation-wide rollout of student testing across all grades. ### Product Design @ Facebook Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | Menlo Park, California Following on the success of it's new ads business, Facebook was exploring ways to generate new ads products. Lead generation (direct response advertising) was a leading candidate for innovation with advertisers limited to using Newsfeed display ads to drive traffic to their sites. The resulting lead generation experience for advertisers and users was slow, inconsistent, cumbersome and hard to manage. We saw an opportunity to create a native Lead Ads experience where advertisers could combine rich content with simple to use forms pre-filled with Facebook profile information. As one of the original product designers, I led the design efforts for the Lead Ads tools which included a full suite of form creation and management tools, in-product CRM integration for SMBs and product experience integrations with Ads Manager, Power Editor and Business Manager. Working on very fast timelines, I conducted discovery calls with pilot customers and partnered with our user researchers and data science teams to continuously identify key problems and needs which informed our design priorities. In a little over a year we went from launching a simple pilot based on internal tools to an advanced suite of lead ad creation tools and an engaging ads experiences that generated $1b in business. ### Principal Product Designer @ Mint.com Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | menlo park, california Our Consumer Experience Group was exploring ways to appeal younger generations who were taking more ownership of their financial lives. As a lead product designer for Mint, I collaborated with user research and product leadership to define the overall product strategy as well as leading design for key product initiatives. In redesigning the Mint.com registration, onboarding and homepage experiences, we applied an experiment-driven approach to address user activation and engagement problems. I designed onboarding variations for adding bank accounts, a critical step to generate quick financial insights. I co-led a redesign of the homepage where we added financial content, revamped our financial offers and introduce a new coaching module to guide money management tasks. In partnership with Amex, I led the design direction for a money management mobile app to support the underbanked. I conducted surveys and interviews to understand how younger generations thought about and approached financial topics which I developed into product storyboards and concept designs. The project ended up being canceled due to a shift in our strategy. As part of our growth strategy, we launched a new set of Credit Score products for web and mobile. I led the overall design for our web product, designing a dynamic education feature that helped users understand and manage their score. The successful launch of these products and the new engagement helped drive the growth of our credit monitoring and financial offers businesses. ### Sr. Director of Development - SAP Cloud @ SuccessFactors Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | South San Francisco Co-designed an insights app for executives to help them track key performance indicators (KPIs), access go-to-market (GTM) content, and communicate effectively. Lars Dalgaard demonstrated the app at the 2012 SAPPHIRE keynote, and it later evolved into a new customer insights product. Collaborated with the Senior Vice President of Product to improve the product development process, allowing teams to work more efficiently. After conducting research to identify problems, I co-led an eight-week project to create a mobile app to help product teams share updates and stay coordinated throughout their projects. Working closely with a the Core HR team, we followed a weekly cycle to conduct research, develop designs, create quick prototypes, and test them with users. Despite ending, we defined success by what we learned as a team, demonstrating that a fast, iterative approach could be more effective than a traditional waterfall method. ### Director of Development - SAP Cloud @ SAP Labs Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 SAP and the enterprise software market were shifting towards more consumer-friendly OnDemand solutions. As a product design leader in the Product Design Group, which included product managers, designers, and developers, I applied Design Thinking tools and principles to help define the product vision and roadmaps for our existing Lines of Business (LOB) teams, specifically Talent Acquisition OnDemand and Contracts Management. I conducted customer visits and interviews, led design workshops, and created product concepts and prototypes that we tested with customers and users. ### Staff Interaction Designer - Integrated Consumer Experiences UED @ Yahoo! Jan 2006 – Jan 2010 As a staff interaction designer, I was part of the Front Doors design team, where I supported the Yahoo! Homepage, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Toolbar, and new product development. I contributed to the launch of Yahoo! Buzz, a social news aggregator a core part of Yahoo!'s digital media and content strategy. While collaborating with a design partner on the overall design, I primarily focused on the tools for publishers to create and manage their content. Shortly after its launch, Buzz became the top social news product, even causing a major news website to crash. As the lead designer, I redesigned the Yahoo! Toolbar to deliver a more personalized browsing experience and grow the $250 million business. Innovations included a web-based toolbar customization wizard, dynamic product alerts, and rich Yahoo! content apps. A project highlight was conducting RITE studies using a live HTML prototype built in collaboration with our UI engineers and user researcher. Additional work included designing My Yahoo! and Homepage modules for news, sports, mail, movies, and Flickr as well as experimental projects for community-generated topic pages and a dynamic browser sidebar that generated personalized topics based on a user's browsing behavior. ### Senior User Interface Designer @ eBay Jan 2005 – Jan 2006 As a senior designer, I worked closely with UED researchers, visual designers, content managers, and prototypers to support our Trust and Safety products, helping buyers and sellers conduct business safely. A major accomplishment was leading the successful redesign of the eBay Feedback System (aka Detailed Seller Ratings), which helped sellers differentiate themselves in the marketplace while giving buyers valuable information to inform buying decisions. In doing so, I worked with our seller community team to understand their problems and collect valuable design feedback. One of many highlights was collaborating with my research partner to conduct new experimental design research across four countries and thousands of users. Getting to review designs with Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder, was pretty cool too. ### UX Manager @ Elance Inc Jan 2000 – Jan 2005 | Sunnyvale, California, United States eLance was a digital services marketplace that linked buyers posting digital projects (like taxes and digital marketing) with vetted service providers globally. As a UI producer, I supported all parts of our marketplace, including registration, accounts, listings, billing, payments, education, and support. Eventually, I managed a small team of designers and UI engineers. Together, we helped lead a company transition into enterprise software, launching and growing our multi-product services procurement solution that helped enterprise companies manage their services spending. ### Interactive Media Specialist @ UC Davis Extension Jan 1997 – Jan 2000 As an interactive media specialist and founding member of the UC Davis Extension multimedia studio, I co-led design efforts in building distance learning campus website and digital learning products. One of my highlights designing and producing an interactive orientation CD-ROM for incoming college students, for which I produced the digital video content. ## Education ### B.S. in Landscape Architecture University of California, Davis ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/timrechin - Portfolio: https://adplist.org/mentors/tim-rechin --- Source: https://flows.cv/timrechin JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/timrechin/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13