Alex Jolley

Head of Design

alex@jolley.app me.jolley.app (801) 413-4760 linkedin.com/in/itsjolley SLC, UT

Summary

Head of Design with 15+ years in product design, leading a team of 7 across product design, brand strategy, and graphic design at Arivo — reporting to the CTO and owning design for 8 software products.

I build design orgs that ship: standing up hiring, research practice, and design systems from scratch, cutting developer rework 48% and halving discovery cycles.

Hands-on enough to build the tooling myself — I write front-end and native code, which keeps me credible with engineering and fast at proving ideas.

Experience

  1. Head of Design

    Arivo · auto finance · ~300 employees · 8 products Sep 2023 – Present

    • Grew design from 2 to 7 across three functions — product design, brand strategy, and graphic design — hiring 5 designers and building the leveling, review, and career-mapping structure the team runs on.
    • Cut developer rework 48% and halved discovery cycles by standing up usability testing, structured design documentation, and product analytics across 8 products.
    • Built internal and external design systems from scratch — ~100 components across 3 platforms — establishing the patterns every Arivo product ships on.
    • Took mid-development handoff revisions from ten per month to zero with an automated tool linking Figma and the design system directly to Git.
    • Mentored 3 team members through structured career development — transitioning one from operations into product management, one from administration into product design (promoted to junior designer), and one from legal into copywriting.
    • Drove business-impacting UX improvements: autopay opt-ins up 31%, direct refinance conversion up 65%, and funding workflow optimizations that reduced time to fund by 33%.

  2. Lead Product Designer

    BOOM Interactive Jan 2022 – Sep 2023

    • Led a team of 4 product and graphic designers, overseeing daily creative output and aligning project delivery with business goals.
    • Designed and delivered 3D UI elements optimized for multiplatform applications, enhancing visual depth and user engagement across devices.
    • Co-developed the company's core brand, visual identity, and voice, establishing comprehensive style guidelines across all marketing and product channels.

  3. Senior Product Designer

    Keller Williams Jan 2021 – Dec 2022

    • Owned the end-to-end design and delivery of major features, driving products from initial concept sketches through final production release.
    • Designed and shipped virtual walkthrough capabilities that lifted remote buyer engagement 32%.
    • Managed a team of designers and videographers on a fast-paced roadmap, delivering on tight timelines without sacrificing quality.

  4. Early Career History

    • Lead Designer FNX Fit Feb 2019 – Jan 2021
    • UX Designer Day One Logistics Jan 2017 – Feb 2019
    • UI / Web Designer AdvancedMD 2015 – 2016
    • Web Designer FATFISH 2013 – 2015
    • Graphic Designer Sizzling Platter 2011 – 2013

Skills & Toolkit

Leadership — Team building, hiring, org design, mentorship, design ops, cross-functional strategy

Design & prototyping — Product design, interaction design, brand & visual, accessibility Figma, Sketch, Adobe, Storybook

Design systems — Cross-platform component libraries, governance, adoption Storybook, Figma

Research & measurement — User research, usability testing, product analytics PostHog, Heap, Lyssna, Dovetail, FigJam

Delivery & design ops — Roadmapping, project management, design operations Jira, ProductBoard, GitHub

Engineering & AI — HTML/CSS/JS, Three.js, Swift / native macOS; agents and skills to accelerate shipping Claude Code, Cursor, Figma MCP

Solo Projects

Community

Training — Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF) — product design, UX research, and design leadership coursework

IxDF Local Leader, Interaction Design Foundation — Organizing local meetups and fostering the design community.

Organizer & Founder, utUX — A user experience, design thinking, and product meetup in the Utah valley.

Writing — Published articles on product design process, typography, accessibility, and design fundamentals.