MEL LENT
Product Design Lead
Creative professional with 10 years of experience building websites, apps, and databases with user-focused features. Uses data to craft visually modern, accessible, and intuitive experiences. Collaborates cross-functionally to modernize digital products. Leads by coaching teams of 4+ designers, providing feedback, building relationships, optimizing team operations, and establishing design best practices.
Skills
AI Infrastructure & Design | UX & Product Strategy | Product Design | UI & UX Design | Project & Product Management | Wireframing | Prototyping | Usability Testing | Analytics | Data Visualization | Quantitative & Qualitative Research | UX Research | Design Systems
Experience
PRINCIPAL PRODUCT DESIGNER, TRUST & WILL
Designed B2B experiences for attorneys, nonprofits, and advisors, using AI tools and traditional design software.
AI Infrastructure
- Architected multiple Figma Make environments to replicate different B2B live sites, allowing rapid prototyping of new features in context.
- Leveraged other AI tools, like Notion AI, Claude Code, Gemini, Slack’s AI, and more, to assist in automating process and synthesizing inputs.
B2B Feature Work
- Built a fully responsive proof of concept to emulate a new referral pipeline for attorneys, showing workflow progression with functioning data ingestion and animations, to enable the business to automate a previously off-platform experience and enhance data capture.
- Reimagined advisor onboarding, thinking through user needs and creating a phased approach to support development timelines.
- Designed an AI-first experience for advisors, allowing them to view client documents via a natural language summary, and helping them batch edit inputs in a way that reduced token costs while improving ease of use.
PRODUCT STRATEGY & DESIGN CONSULTANT, M LENT
Product design consulting, system-building, and data analysis for early stage startups.
Design Jobs Site
- Built a low-code responsive site in Framer to help designers find their next role; this consisted of compiling, rating, and reviewing job boards, communities, and tools to make the search more efficient, then organizing by perceived value and utility.
Ed Tech AI Startup
- Researched investment trends for a pre-seed ed tech AI startup, identifying patterns among 136 early stage investors that historically invested in the same sector at the same stage; patterns included correlations between number of investments, stage-specific check size, number of employees, and more.
- Designed custom Airtable data visualization dashboard with interactive filters to show trends, highlight patterns, and enable the executive team to better navigate the investment landscape.
- Facilitated team-building personality charting activities, and leveraged AI to perform nuanced analysis of team member differences in pairs, highlighting opportunities for team members to support each other.
- Built custom project tracking interface in Notion to connect the dots on team task tracking, linking relational databases to support individual filtered views and task grouping by initiative.
Hardware AI Startup
- Supported a pre-seed hardware startup by streamlining product market fit strategy, building a pitch deck, and designing a website.
- Pitched to investors and accelerators, incorporating feedback to refine the deck further.
- Set up custom infrastructure for task tracking, file organization and communication, combining Trello, Airtable, and Google Messages to reduce spend and maximize functionality.
Startup Community Involvement
- Volunteered to help support local networking events, engaging attendees in conversation and helping with sign in flows.
- Attended numerous networking events in the NYC startup scene and met 100+ people via organic 1-on-1 conversations.
PRINCIPAL PRODUCT DESIGN LEAD, PEARSON+
Led teams of 3–4 designers, collaborated with cross-functional stakeholders, and executed individual contributor design projects.
Design Systems for Pearson+
- Built out an atomic grayscale wireframe component library in Figma, to help improve efficiency and expedite iteration prior to high fidelity.
- Audited the existing live site using a custom Airtable template, employing four linked data sets to document all 150 URLs, capture page linking data, and list components present within pages.
- Built a custom interface connected to the data set, leveraging data visualization to show current page structure patterns and outliers, as well as visuals of the components themselves. Presented findings and recommendations.
- Documented atomic design system components and usage guidelines in Zeroheight, and linked to Storybook for front end visibility.
Product Design & Strategy for Pearson+
- Led a team to design net new wireframes for a new product platform, considering competitive research, user needs, and market gaps.