UX & Product Designer
Brian Schwartz
Senior design leader with 20+ years of experience building UX teams, design systems, and enterprise products from concept to delivery.
About
I'm an Experience Design leader based in St. Louis, Missouri, with 20+ years leading UX, product design, and design systems across consulting, enterprise, and startup environments.
Before returning to consulting at Centric, I spent two years at PepsiCo as Senior Director of Service Design, where I helped grow a service design team from the ground up and built the first global design system for PepsiCo's internal applications. Earlier, I co-founded two companies, including Barrelfish, a funded B2B SaaS startup where I led product and design from concept through launch.
I partner closely with business, engineering, and design teams to drive user-centered delivery at scale, moving between executive-level strategy and hands-on design work depending on what the project needs.
Core Capabilities
- Design Team Leadership
- Product & Service Design
- UX Research & Strategy
- DesignOps & Design Systems
- Prototyping & Testing
- UI / Visual Design
- Mobile App Design
- Responsive Web Design
- Figma / Sketch / Adobe CC
- Front-End Development
Selected Work
Full case studies are available in the password-protected portfolio.
Open Source · Side Project · 2026
DeckhandAI
Built a self-hosted job search tracker in two weeks through agentic conversation — no code authored directly. Playwright scraping, AI fit scoring, DOCX generation, and a chat assistant I added in an evening just to see if it worked.
UX Design Lead · 2024–Present
Financial Services
Redesign of the Compliance Data Center and Sponsor Dashboard for a third-party retirement administrator.
Senior Director, Service Design · 2022–2024
PepsiCo
Led creation of a design system, end-to-end redesign of an AI-powered promotion management application, and a pricing simulation interface.
Side Project · 2019
Christmas Music by the Numbers
12,329 plays tracked across a 37-day holiday season. Spoiler: Mariah Carey is not a myth. She is a measurable phenomenon.
Writing
Design workflow, tooling, and process.
Local Model or Cloud Model? I Use Both, on Purpose.
The same three morning briefs, written one day by a cloud model and the next by a model running on a Mac Mini at home. What local AI is good for outside of code, and where the cloud still earns its bill.
Client-Ready Designs · Part 4
Designing a Chat Interface Nobody Notices
What broke while I let an agent draft deckhandAI's chat assistant, and what those failures taught me about designing conversational UI agentically.
Client-Ready Designs · Part 3
Skip the Blank Canvas. Let AI Generate the First Draft.
Four agentic design tools — Claude, Gemini, Figma Make, and Lovable — and where each one fits in a workflow for getting a credible first draft without starting from zero.
UX Research in the Agentic AI Era
How AI tools like Dovetail, Marvin, and Microsoft Copilot are compressing the research cycle — and why the human judgment calls matter more than ever.
Client-Ready Designs · Part 2
Skip Figma for Data Tables. Use AI to Build the Real Thing.
For complex data tables and dashboards, a working HTML prototype beats a Figma frame every time. A walkthrough of Claude, Cursor, and shadcn/ui for generating interactive prototypes in code.
Client-Ready Designs · Part 1
How I Create Realistic Data in Figma Mockups
When designing for financial services or other regulated industries, placeholder text and fake numbers derail feedback sessions. Here's a repeatable two-tool process that keeps mockups credible.
