Brendan Bolton-Klinger — Product Designer & Creative Leader

Hello! I’m Brendan -
product Designer
Creative LEader
Mentor & ally
“Player-Coach” leader with 20+ years of experience
Working with organizations at various levels of maturity, from startups to multinationals
Whichever lens you’re looking through,
These are my specialties
Engagements
Going 0 to 1
Helping new businesses, like startups, get off the ground and launch a product.
Turning Things Up to 11
Helping established companies go through transformative growth, like expanding into new spaces or reinventing themselves.
Coming to Jesus
Helping companies that know they have a broken experience to change, and get their product organized and aligned with users' needs and business goals.
Organizational Change
Same as above, but also building Design capability within an organization: Setting up Design Ops, Systems, Processes, Recruiting, and AI Orchestrations.
Roles
Director
Working within an organization (or agency) and leading all the work streams for a given product (or account) and managing the related Product Design/UX teams for those work streams.
Lead
Being the Product Design/UX lead on a single work stream, managing a small team.
Individual Contributor
Being the Product Design/UX lead on a work stream, without support (responsible for design, strategy, research etc...)
Things I'll bring to the party
Capabilities
& Skills
Design
Product Design
AI Experience Design
Prototyping
AI Design Orchestration
User Experience
Research
User Research
Usability Research
Competitive Analysis
Analytics Review
Agentic Research
Strategy
Product Strategy
Use-Cases & User-Flows
Personas
AI Integration & Optimization
Experience Architecture
Collaboration
Workshops & Brainstorming
Cross-Funcitonal Collaboration
Client Interviews
Leadership
Product Ownership
Creative Direction
Team Management
Individual Mentorship
Operations
Design Ops
Design Systems
Design Documentation
Accessibility
I’ve built these skills at some of the world’s most innovative agencies...
while working with some of our most admired brands.
My driving passion is helping people overcome obstacles to achieve their goals.
I believe design, and leadership, both enable people to be more productive, gain more freedom, and get closer to where they want to be. That's why I love doing this work.
I also love sharing this knowledge through teaching, which I’ve done at these places.
And in my down time, I focus on learning and trying new challenges like ...
✨
AI Tools & Nerdery
🍄
Mycology &
micronutrients
🎲
Board game design
🥋
Teaching Brazilian
Jiu Jitsu to Kids
I can share this
Public Work
Healthcare  2020-2023
As Experience Director contracting with Fantasy, I led all of our workstreams on this massive account for the largest healthcare company in the country. Our projects spanned across multiple business units, and included the creation of an AI-driven patient profile, a telehealth application, cross-product design system, and a business-wide portal experience.
Experience Director
Design Direction & Management
Product Design & Prototyping
user research
Product Strategy Collaboration
Marketing SaaS  2017-21
I helped this fast-growing influencer marketing platform, mature their product and develop their Design department as we grew from a 10 to 50+ person company. During that time, I created their design library, designed key product areas, hired and onboarded other designers, spoke to tons of customers, and worked closely with the founders and cross-discipline leads.  Near the end of my tenure, Refersion was acquired by Assembly (who reached a 1BN valuation shortly after.)
Principal Product Designer
design ops & hiring
cross-functional collaboration
product design & prototyping
user research
Insurance Startup  2019-20
I worked directly with the CEO of DayForward to define and create the first iteration of a new type of life insurance, focused on the more graspable concept of “income replacement” as opposed to the industry-standard “death benefit”.  It has since grown to a team of 30+ with a valuation of ~75MM. (Fun fact - The CEO and I used to work together when he was the CEO of Huge, and we previously founded a different start-up together. More below.)
Product Design Director
Product Design & Prototyping
Product Strategy Collaboration
  
  
Other work highlights
BGB Group
Sr. Director of Experience Design
BGB, a twenty-year-old agency focused on pharma and healthcare, created an internal AI product lab. My extremely multifaceted role centered around hands-on product design and research, as well as product management and ownership of one of our flagship products "Audience Simulator". My work drove client engagement, trials and eventually purchases.
Age of Learning
UX Design Lead
"We have a massive product ecosystem and want it to feel amazing and integrated" was the brief when I began working with this incredibly ambitious early-education giant. I was asked to work across their entire product ecosystem, starting with helping to redesign their current experiences, and later on concepting, designing, and testing many of their new products.
HUGE
Experience Lead
An amazing learning experience throughout the five+ years I was there. So grateful to all of the talented and creative people I collaborated with and worked alongside. Started in Brooklyn and then moved to LA office. Helped run the UX department and led and contributed to multiple accounts.
Honey
Founder
Wouldn’t it be an efficient way to get smarter if you could easily see all the useful stuff your smart colleagues were reading? I thought so and pitched this idea to my colleagues at HUGE and it was green-lit for our internal incubator. I worked on the initial concept, and then later became an advisor. Honey was acquired in 2022.
Can I show you my most recent
Case Studies?
Let's connect!
Brendanbkbk@gmail.com
LinkedIn
Resume
917.806.0855
🔝