About
Product: Designer / Developer / Manager
Hi, I'm Roarke. Across Fortune 500s, startups, and nonprofits, I've ended up in most of the seats a product needs: design, product management, development, QA. Sometimes by title. Usually because the seat was empty and the product couldn't wait.
Whichever seat I'm in, I can speak the language.
As a design consultant with frog, I did interaction design for some of tech's biggest platforms. At SageMaker I prototyped how six kinds of users, from data scientists to analysts, would collaborate inside an ML platform — turning an open question into options stakeholders could click through and choose between. At Samsung Food I designed the architecture and UX, starting from the meal rather than the machine, so a connected kitchen finally had one front door. At IBM I designed the “single pane of glass” that pulled a sprawling DevOps platform into one view a team could actually read.
I've also built my own. Through the VR boom I led product at UploadVR, which grew into far more than a publication: a developer academy, coworking spaces, and the events where the field found each other ($6M raised, 200 million reached). I co-founded a collateral-backed lending fintech built on smart contracts, serving as COO, product manager, and designer at once. The work that taught me the most was the work that fought back: leading the redesigns at Brandless and Storefront, I saw what happens when the promises run ahead of the product. Hype is a loan, and the bill always arrives. Growth that lasts is led by the product.
Pro bono, I helped launch Aloha Tree Alliance, treating forest restoration like a product: empowered teams, clear outcomes, a roadmap a serious funder could believe in. It earned a place in an $8 million NOAA grant and has put thousands of native trees in the ground, powered by tens of thousands of volunteer hours.
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Every product needs design, management, and development. I mean something specific by each. Design isn't how a thing looks — it's how well the form fits the problem it lives in, all the needs and constraints and stubborn habits you only learn by staying close. Good design is invisible until the day it fails. Management is deciding what matters next and saying it in a language every seat understands. Development is where those decisions meet reality. The three only work woven together. My own projects exist because I wanted to hold all of them at once. Each one, from Feedback Loops to UserActivity.ai to ProductMetrics.org, is a problem I stayed close to, worked until the guessing turned into learning.
I do my best work with sharp, engaged people next to me. I've led teams and I've been down in the weeds myself. Happy either way, as long as the work matters.
Think there's a seat I should be in?