I've led product design for more than 15 years and started and sold a company of my own along the way. I like to stay close to customers and executives, but I still like to do the hard work alongside my teams. Today that means moving quickly with AI while building AI-native teams. I think the most interesting work in design is still ahead.
Experience
-
I lead an AI-native design team building innovative products for real estate professionals. We design with AI and for it: agents, automation and the tools agents and brokers run their businesses on.
-
I was the founding product designer and head of design, working directly with the CEO, Adam Neumann. I stood up the product design organization, created the design system, hired designers and design engineers, and designed five products from scratch: the Neighbor App and website for residents, and AI-powered tools for the operators, accounting and leasing teams behind them.
-
After Digs was acquired I led the team behind Movoto Homeowner, which brought in over a million new monthly active users, and the redesign of search across web and native apps.
-
I advised the founders and led the rebrand and iOS redesign of a rent-reporting startup that has since raised over $100M.
-
I co-founded Digs to help first-time buyers save for a home. I led design from an education MVP to an FDIC-insured savings product used by more than 20,000 savers, signed lender partners including Rocket Mortgage, and took the company through its acquisition.
-
My formative years as a designer. My first job was as a designer in residence at a late-stage venture capital firm in Chicago, where I worked on UI and UX projects for its portfolio companies. I then joined a boutique product design studio, working with clients from startups to Fortune 500 companies and getting a taste of agency life. After that, I founded Digs in 2018.
Selected work
-
Flow
Standing up a product design organization, a design system, and five products from scratch.
Head of Design & Founding Product Designer
-
Movoto Homeowner
Empowering people to make better decisions around their largest asset, their home.
Principal Product Designer
-
Esusu Redesign
Helping people overcome the biggest barrier to financial stability and freedom, their credit score.
Advisor & Consultant
-
Movoto Search
Unlocking real estate insights for millions of consumers searching for their next home.
Principal Product Designer
-
Digs Saver
Guiding first-time home buyers to save with clarity, confidence, and meaningful rewards.
Co-Founder & Design Lead
-
Digs Pro
An enterprise nurturing and retention tool for real estate brokers and mortgage lenders.
Co-Founder & Design Lead
Chad excels at storytelling with mixed data, combining qualitative insight, quantitative signals, and clear visual design to tell a compelling, grounded story. He explains and defends design decisions in a way that non-design leaders can easily understand.
Larcombe Teichgraeber Worked with Chad at OJO Labs Never satisfied with “what is”, Chad is always thinking 3 steps ahead to an experience vision of where his product can go, the potential value it can deliver, and the steps to get it there.
Drew Miller Managed Chad directly Notes
Long-form writing on AI, design leadership, and what I learned founding a company.
-
Building a playground for AI-native learning
Bixel is where I build my own crawlers, bots and LLM data extraction. Here is what is in it, what broke, and what it taught me.
-
Getting a bot verified by Cloudflare
What Cloudflare's Verified Bots program is, what it took for a one-person crawler to get in, and what it says about bot and human traffic on the web.
-
Headless products make research the design work
If customers reach your product through an agent instead of your interface, the design that matters is how well you understand what they were trying to do.
-
An agent is a job description
The hardest part of building an agent is the part companies have always been bad at, which is writing down what the job actually is.