About Ryan Schmidt — Senior B2B SaaS Product Designer

Leadership

I care about how the whole product works, from the underlying logic to the details on screen.

At i4cp, I'm the sole product designer. I write PRDs, maintain design tokens, and work with our VP of Product and engineers to shape the roadmap. I also write Trello tickets and test work in staging, helping the team move from an idea to clear requirements and a release we've checked.

Before this at D-Tools, I facilitated twice-weekly design reviews with five designers and six PMs to stress-test assumptions before implementation. The best sessions were the ones where we uncovered hidden technical friction and shifted direction before writing code.

  • Concept to production

    User research, PRDs, component specs, and staging prototypes

  • Systems & delivery

    Information architecture, technical tradeoffs, and design tokens

  • 400+
    Designlab critique sessions

    Mentored 1,500+ designers over 5 years on problem framing, UX research methods, and design rationale

  • AI-assisted building

    Prototyping in Cursor and Claude Code to validate layout behavior, keyboard focus, and responsive edge cases early

  • Custom AI assistant

    A retrieval-augmented chatbot using Gemini and Supabase pgvector to answer questions from real project notes

Builder

I like building what I design. Working in the browser helps me test responsive layouts, keyboard interactions, and the details that are easy to miss in a static mockup.

My coding background goes back nearly a decade, building responsive web interfaces for school board tools at TASB and transit ticketing apps at Bytemark.

I use Cursor and Claude Code to get working prototypes into the browser sooner. I still make the product decisions, review the output, and test how the experience behaves before engineering begins.

Experience

Proven impact across high-growth B2B platforms, from 0→1 workflow MVPs to scaled design systems.

Over the past decade, I've designed enterprise software across HR intelligence, commercial audiovisual systems, public sector operations, and transit ticketing. I partner closely with product management and engineering to turn complex requirements into measurable, shippable products.

  • 18K
    D-Tools active users

    Owned UX across 5 Cloud modules as active users grew from 6,500 to 18,000

  • 92%
    Design system adoption

    100+ production components built and adopted across all engineering teams

  1. CX/UX Designer · Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp)

    Sole designer across 3 core platforms for 4 developers. Standardized UI with a custom design system, shipped coded prototypes in Cursor saving ~4 hrs QA/week, designed Ahri conversational AI (+500% adoption increase), and established i4cp's first user research practice.

  2. Senior Product Designer · D-Tools, Inc.

    Promoted from Product Designer (Jan 2025). Owned end-to-end UX across 5 B2B Cloud modules as active users grew from 6,500 to 18,000. Designed real-time inventory MVP (+18% recurring revenue, 8% YoY adoption growth), custom dashboards (+71% sustained dashboard views, 62% multi-dashboard adoption), and 100+ component design system (92% engineering adoption).

  3. Senior Critique Facilitator · Designlab

    Led 400+ structured critique sessions and mentored 1,500+ designers on problem framing, UX research methods, and design rationale over 5 years.

  4. Earlier Experience & Service

    Product Designer at Bytemark (mobile transit ticketing SaaS, 2021); UI/UX Designer & Facility Specialist at TASB (school board operations SaaS, 2014–2021); US Navy Reserve Aircrewman (AWF3, Secret Clearance, 2011–2014).

Education & Certifications

  1. Fullstack Developer Certification

    Scrimba · Modern frontend engineering and fullstack web application development

  2. Design Systems Certification

    Memorisely · Token architectures, component scalability, and handoff workflows

  3. UX/UI Design Certification

    Designlab · UX Academy immersion and data-driven design

  4. BA, Anthropology

    Clarion University of Pennsylvania · Qualitative Research Methods concentration

Ryan Schmidt with his family hiking in the woods

Life Lately

I live in Austin with my wife, our toddler, and two cats named Pickles and Pesto. Most of life right now revolves around my son: parks, swimming, bedtime stories, snacks in places snacks absolutely should not be, and getting outside whenever we can.

When I'm not designing, I'm usually captaining a beer-league hockey team, trying to learn guitar riffs that are definitely above my skill level, or cooking recipes stolen from our travels. I grew up in Pittsburgh. I definitely don't miss scraping ice off my windshield in February, but I do miss a real white Christmas.