# Matt Bond

Software designer based in the San Francisco Bay Area with over 20 years of experience designing and building products at software companies, from early-stage startups to large-scale platforms.

I help startups turn ideas into products that customers understand, adopt, and love. My strength is combining strong product intuition with high craft and hands-on execution: talking directly to customers, identifying what matters most, shaping product direction with founders and teams, and then designing and shipping the work myself.

I'm most useful in environments where speed, ambiguity, and quality all matter at the same time. I can help figure out what to build, why it matters, how it should work, and then get into the details to make it real — whether that means product strategy, interface design, prototyping, or writing production code.

Over the course of my career, I've worked across 0-to-1 product development, complex enterprise software, consumer products, and more recently AI-native tools and workflows. I've helped teams create new products, improve core experiences, and raise the quality bar without losing momentum.

What I do especially well for startups:

- Turn ambiguous ideas into clear product direction
- Talk to customers and identify real needs worth solving
- Design polished, high-quality product experiences
- Work closely with founders, product, and engineering to make better decisions
- Ship my own work, including prototypes and production code
- Balance near-term execution with longer-term product thinking
- Bring taste, judgment, and urgency to fast-moving teams

I'm especially well suited to startups and growth-stage companies that want someone who can think like a product leader, design with a high level of craft, and operate with enough technical depth to move quickly.

Software Designer based in the San Francisco Bay Area with over 20 years of experience designing products and leading teams at software companies.

## Experience

**Principal Designer at Clarify** (2024 - present)
Creating world-class software for founders and GTM teams. Leading the design of the core product experience, focusing on intuitive interfaces for complex data workflows including AI assistants, prospect research, pipeline management, and automated agents.

**Head of Design at Human Capital** (2023 - 2024)
0-to-1 incubation of new companies and ideas.

**Principal Product Designer at Retool** (2021 - 2023)
Created Retool Database with Sikan He. Led design, product, and some frontend development. Grew and scaled design through recruiting and design systems. Key projects included Retool Database, Grid, and Workflows.

**Principal Product Designer at Quizlet** (2020 - 2021)
Led teams for Study Tools, Discovery, and Design Systems at the consumer learning platform.

**Director of Design at Asana** (2017 - 2019)
Ran the Adoption design team for 2.5 years working on onboarding, core project management experience, monetization and billing flows, and enterprise readiness.

**Lead Designer at Dropbox** (2015 - 2016)
Led design and design management for the File Collaboration team. Overhauled sharing and contributed to company vision 2-3 years out alongside VPs.

**Lead Designer at Atlassian** (2011 - 2015)
Led design on Bitbucket and created and managed the Atlassian Design System for the first 3 years of its life.

**User Experience Designer at M&C Saatchi** (2010 - 2011)

**Design Engineer at MAD Media Group** (2007 - 2010)

**Freelance Design Engineer** (2003 - 2007)

## Expertise

- Product design and design leadership
- 0-to-1 product development
- AI product interfaces and agent workflows
- Frontend development
- Enterprise and B2B SaaS
- Team building and recruiting
- High-craft interface design for complex products

## Writing

- [Building trust by taking a cross functional approach](https://www.designsystems.com/build-trust-by-taking-a-cross-functional-approach/) - designsystems.com, 2019
- [The key lessons I learned creating a popular Design System](https://medium.com/@MattBond21/the-key-lessons-i-learned-creating-a-popular-design-system-d078c817b4dd) - Medium, 2018
- [Slack's design is not secret sauce](https://uxdesign.cc/slack-s-design-is-not-secret-sauce-8e07bdb67d84) - Medium, 2015
- [How we made the Atlassian Design Guidelines](https://medium.com/@MattBond21/how-we-made-the-atlassian-design-guidelines-d59a67d6d8eb) - Medium, 2013

## Patents

- [Managing Tasks in a Content Management System](https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2018125358/) - WO2018125358A1, 2018

## Links

- Portfolio: https://mattbond.me
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mattbond21
- Medium: https://medium.com/@mattbond21
- X: https://x.com/mattbond21