Alex Jolley

Design Leader & Product Builder

alex@jolley.app me.jolley.app (801) 413-4760 linkedin.com/in/itsjolley SLC, UT

Summary

Design Leader and Product Builder with 15+ years of experience spanning product design, design systems, and front-end development.

Currently Head of Design at Arivo, building and scaling the design organization and shaping the direction for multiple software products.

I also ship software solo - native macOS apps, multiplatform SaaS, CLI tools, and web experiments.

Experience

  1. Head of Design

    Arivo 2023 – Present

    • Scaled and matured the design organization by establishing dedicated product design, brand strategy, and graphic design branches to support company growth.
    • Implemented comprehensive internal and external user testing frameworks, introducing structured documentation and product analytics to drive data-informed design decisions. This reduced developer rework by 48%, and cut product discovery cycles in half.
    • Designed and developed an automated internal tool linking Figma and the design system directly to Git, which reduced mid-development handoff revisions from ten per month to zero.
    • Mentored junior designers and interns, providing structured career mapping and technical guidance to accelerate their professional growth.
    • Built comprehensive internal and external design systems from scratch, establishing unified UI components, patterns, and style guides to ensure cross-platform consistency.
  2. Lead Product Designer

    BOOM Interactive 2022 – 2023

    • Led and managed a growing team of product and graphic designers, overseeing daily creative output and aligning project delivery with business goals.
    • Designed and delivered 3D UI elements optimized for multiplatform applications, enhancing visual depth and user engagement across devices.
    • Co-developed the company's core brand, visual identity, and voice, establishing comprehensive style guidelines to ensure consistent messaging across all marketing and product channels.
  3. Senior Product Designer

    Keller Williams 2021 – 2022

    • Owned the end-to-end design and delivery of major features, driving products from initial concept sketches through final production release.
    • Designed and shipped groundbreaking virtual walkthrough capabilities, significantly improving the digital experience, resulting in a 32% increase in remote buyer engagement.
    • Managed a fast-paced team of designers and videographers, successfully meeting tight deadlines while maintaining high standards for creative and functional output.
  4. Lead Designer

    FNX Fit 2019 – 2021

    • Led product, brand, and visual design for a fitness startup.
  5. UX Designer

    Day One Logistics 2017 – 2019

    • UX design for freight logistics tools — research, flows, and interfaces.
  6. Early Career History

    • UI / Web Designer AdvancedMD 2015 – 2016
    • Web Designer FATFISH 2013 – 2015
    • Graphic Designer Sizzling Platter 2011 – 2013

Solo Projects

Additional experiments in Three.js and web responsiveness available at me.jolley.app.

Skills & Toolkit

Design & prototyping — Product design, design systems, interaction design, brand & visual design, accessibility. Figma, Sketch, Adobe, Storybook

Research & discovery — User research, interviews, usability testing, and synthesis. Lyssna / Maze / UserTesting, Dovetail / Marvin, FigJam / Miro

Measurement — Product analytics, behavioral data, dashboards, and observability. PostHog, Heap, PowerBI / Tableau, DataDog

Delivery & collaboration — Roadmapping, design ops, project management, and version control. ProductBoard, Jira / Confluence, Basecamp / Monday / Asana, Coda, GitHub / GitLab

Engineering — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Three.js, Swift / native macOS development.

AI integration — Building agents and skills to accelerate design and shipping. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Figma MCP, Paper.design, Pencil.dev

Leadership — Team building, hiring, scaling, mentorship, design ops, cross-functional product strategy

Community

IxDF Local Leader, Interaction Design Foundation — Organizing local meetups and fostering the design community.

Organizer & Founder, utUX — A user experience, design thinking, and product meetup in the Utah valley.

Writing — Published articles on product design process, typography, accessibility, and design fundamentals.