Strategic design, measured in business results.
I'm John DeSouza, a Director of Product Design. Thirteen years in product design, the last six leading distributed teams through 0→1 products in consumer lending, blockchain infrastructure, and enterprise identity.
Selected work
Selected work, outcome first.
Each case study opens with the outcome, then shows the design decisions behind it, the team, and what I'd do differently next time.
Cross-Sell: Vehicle Equity & Home Secured Loans
Turned a loan decline into a second offer instead of a dead end. A 0→1 feature across two secured products shipping on separate release cadences.
Verifications
Closed the loop after document upload so applicants stopped calling to ask what happened. Led discovery through an A/B test with product, engineering and compliance.
Staking v0.1
Removed friction from staking LINK with intuitive flows, transparent documentation and real-time visibility into rewards and pool status.
No-code tools
Let teams build authentication flows through visual configuration instead of code, without taking away the control developers need.
How I lead
Set the direction, coach the decisions, hold the bar.
I set strategy clearly enough that the team can make its own calls, then spend my time on feedback and quality rather than approvals. I sit with product leadership so the outcomes we design against are ones design helped define.
Coaching and autonomy
The team makes the decisions. I make sure they can.
Strategy sets the boundaries
I define the design strategy and the framework decisions get made against. Inside it, designers decide without waiting on me. A team that has to route every call through its director stops scaling at one person.
Feedback is the job
Most of my week goes into feedback: weekly reviews, structured critique, and time on specific work with specific people. Consistency matters more than volume, and it's how strategy stays real instead of a deck.
I hold the quality bar
I review against the standard rather than my own taste, which means the bar is something the team can apply themselves: spacing and layout, design system usage, color and contrast, accessibility.
A seat in product leadership
I sit with product leadership to help define what the products are trying to achieve, so design is shaping the outcome rather than reacting to a roadmap it had no part in setting.
How I track design
Three layers, one chain.
Design is accountable at three levels at once, and they feed each other. Craft moves behavior, behavior moves the number the business already reports. Any surface I own carries all three, so a decision can be traced end to end.
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Design quality
Craft checkSpacing and layout QA, design system component usage, color and contrast, accessibility violations. The diagnostics that keep quality from drifting once a team is moving fast.
SignalA design decision -
Experience metrics
Leading indicatorCompletion rate, time to decision, drop-off at each step. At least one has to be perceptual, like effort or confidence, or the layer only measures speed.
SignalA behavior change -
Business outcome
North StarConversion, activation, retention. Design answers to the same number the business already reports, not a parallel one invented for design.
SignalA business result
AI in the process
AI isn't the solution. It's a tool that helps us get to one.
Cursor
Figma MCP
ChatGPT
Claude
My teams use AI for the parts of design that used to be slow: iterating on a flow, working through concepts, explaining how an interaction behaves, and getting something real in front of customers while it's still cheap to change.
I'm deliberate about how it enters the process. AI moves faster than most tools do, so we adopt it on purpose rather than by default, and we keep checking that it earns its place. The point isn't to collapse the lines between design, product and engineering. It's to give all three a faster way to see the same thing.
About
Thirteen years in product design, six managing remote design orgs. I lead teams that align their output to impact.
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5 designersRemote, US
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4 senior designersGlobally remote
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7 designersGlobally remote
Get in touch
Building or rebuilding a design org? Let's talk.
I'm happy to walk through any of these case studies in more depth, or share the full presentation.