Josef Richter

Contact Me

Product Designer & Manager

Design lead with 14 years of experience. I helped companies like Vodafone, T-Mobile or Medable to rethink, redesign and rebuild their products from scratch, or take them to the next level. Thanks to my diverse experience, I am especially strong in building alliances across teams and management layers to make change happen.

What people say

“One of the most thoughtful product design leaders I've had the pleasure of working with throughout my career. ”
– Joshua Bryant
Director of Product Design
at Medable
"It’s rare that you come across exceptional talent like Josef. He showed outstanding product design skills and a deep understanding of product strategy."
– Timon Reinhardt
Lead PO Smart Home
at T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom
"Josef is a thoughtful, skillful design lead who combines mastery of his craft with perceptive analysis, a focus on users, and excellent communication."
– Andrew Purcell
Senior Director, Digital UX & Design
at Marriott International
"Josef is a bright holistic design thinker. He is able to break down the brief or problem into smaller clear parts, and provides clear paths to take."
– Sina Mossayeb
Chief Design Officer
at Medable
"His many years of experience and ability to get deep into the technical aspects of work was an immense asset to our work!"
– Chris Meierling
Director of Service Design
at Medable
“Professional, organized, calm, experienced, and creative.”
– Joshua Bryant
Director of Product Design
at Medable
"I was particularly impressed by Josef’s ability to remove nonessential complexity from the product, which not only made a huge difference in the productivity of our team, but also led to extraordinary results in user testing."
– Timon Reinhardt
Lead PO Smart Home
at T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom
“One of the most thoughtful product design leaders I've had the pleasure of working with throughout my career. ”
– Joshua Bryant
Director of Product Design
at Medable
"It’s rare that you come across exceptional talent like Josef. He showed outstanding product design skills and a deep understanding of product strategy."
– Timon Reinhardt
Lead PO Smart Home
at T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom
"Josef is a thoughtful, skillful design lead who combines mastery of his craft with perceptive analysis, a focus on users, and excellent communication."
– Andrew Purcell
Senior Director, Digital UX & Design
at Marriott International
"Josef is a bright holistic design thinker. He is able to break down the brief or problem into smaller clear parts, and provides clear paths to take."
– Sina Mossayeb
Chief Design Officer
at Medable
"His many years of experience and ability to get deep into the technical aspects of work was an immense asset to our work!"
– Chris Meierling
Director of Service Design
at Medable
“Professional, organized, calm, experienced, and creative.”
– Joshua Bryant
Director of Product Design
at Medable
"I was particularly impressed by Josef’s ability to remove nonessential complexity from the product, which not only made a huge difference in the productivity of our team, but also led to extraordinary results in user testing."
– Timon Reinhardt
Lead PO Smart Home
at T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom
“One of the most thoughtful product design leaders I've had the pleasure of working with throughout my career. ”
– Joshua Bryant
Director of Product Design
at Medable
"It’s rare that you come across exceptional talent like Josef. He showed outstanding product design skills and a deep understanding of product strategy."
– Timon Reinhardt
Lead PO Smart Home
at T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom
"Josef is a thoughtful, skillful design lead who combines mastery of his craft with perceptive analysis, a focus on users, and excellent communication."
– Andrew Purcell
Senior Director, Digital UX & Design
at Marriott International
"Josef is a bright holistic design thinker. He is able to break down the brief or problem into smaller clear parts, and provides clear paths to take."
– Sina Mossayeb
Chief Design Officer
at Medable
"His many years of experience and ability to get deep into the technical aspects of work was an immense asset to our work!"
– Chris Meierling
Director of Service Design
at Medable
“Professional, organized, calm, experienced, and creative.”
– Joshua Bryant
Director of Product Design
at Medable
"I was particularly impressed by Josef’s ability to remove nonessential complexity from the product, which not only made a huge difference in the productivity of our team, but also led to extraordinary results in user testing."
– Timon Reinhardt
Lead PO Smart Home
at T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom
“One of the most thoughtful product design leaders I've had the pleasure of working with throughout my career. ”
– Joshua Bryant
Director of Product Design
at Medable
"It’s rare that you come across exceptional talent like Josef. He showed outstanding product design skills and a deep understanding of product strategy."
– Timon Reinhardt
Lead PO Smart Home
at T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom
"Josef is a thoughtful, skillful design lead who combines mastery of his craft with perceptive analysis, a focus on users, and excellent communication."
– Andrew Purcell
Senior Director, Digital UX & Design
at Marriott International
"Josef is a bright holistic design thinker. He is able to break down the brief or problem into smaller clear parts, and provides clear paths to take."
– Sina Mossayeb
Chief Design Officer
at Medable
"His many years of experience and ability to get deep into the technical aspects of work was an immense asset to our work!"
– Chris Meierling
Director of Service Design
at Medable
“Professional, organized, calm, experienced, and creative.”
– Joshua Bryant
Director of Product Design
at Medable
"I was particularly impressed by Josef’s ability to remove nonessential complexity from the product, which not only made a huge difference in the productivity of our team, but also led to extraordinary results in user testing."
– Timon Reinhardt
Lead PO Smart Home
at T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom

More Testimonials

My Process

I believe you need a structured process to problem solving & product design. I am a listener, thinker, doer – but all that needs to happen within a framework of clear steps that affect one another. Whether it's Design Thinking or other framework, without structure, it's impossible to create great products.

I've written down my thoughts about design & process here:

Read about My Process

Projects:

Medable Clinical Trials

Medable conducts Decentralised Clinical Trials. In a clinical trial, a new drug has to be tested on large number of participants all around the world. Typically a participant would visit their physician, and they would report using standardised paper forms.

Medable provides digital products to perform the trials more efficiently. I was responsible for redesigning the participant app, that is being used by people of all walks of life globally (app translated to 110 languages).

My personal focus was on a crucial component of the app that is used by participants to self-report on the progress of the trial without needing to visit their physician. This was extremely due to brutal constraints: the reporting forms in their original paper form have been around often for 20-30 years and have been used to collect huge body of data over the years.

Therefore the starting point is "you cannot change anything", because every single change, no matter how tiny, may affect and bias the data collected. And biased data means failed trial, which ultimately means lives lost. Let alone the billions of dollars lost (average cost of a clinical trial is $2.6B and average duration is 12 years). The problem is you cannot just show a full paper form on a phone display, because that would be illegible and unusable. So by default, this is almost mission impossible. It might as well be the most sensitive and serious app design work in the world.

We spent a lot of time understanding every single piece of requirements on a scientific level. We regularly worked with science experts to assess various options what can be changed and how much, what would make most sense from user perspective and where is the middle ground between user requirements and science requirements. This is a diligent, sensitive and complex work and I could spend hours explaining the complexities of it.

T-Mobile Smart Home

I was designing a new smart home product for Deutsche Telekom / T-Mobile. This was a large, long term project. It started by introducing a design system at first. Based on new design system we ultimately redesigned the whole product from scratch.

The new product revolved around a concept of "stories" – these were everyday situations, like "turn on lights when I come home", that were supposed to work out of the box with almost zero setup. This was quite a radical departure from existing smart home products in the market, that let you configure all kinds of automations, but usually don't come preconfigured with meaningful use cases.

Advanced prototyping for T-Mobile

Prototyping can save you from many dead ends. I've been creating advanced prototypes, that are often simple but functional apps focusing on the core feature in question. It far more reasonable to spend more time in prototyping stage, rather than in actual development.

This prototype uses Dialogflow API for speech recognition and Firebase for communicating between prototypes (one prototype is the mobile app, another prototype is the desktop app that simulates a room in an apartment). This is all built in Framer. It's a bit slower to respond (the speech recording is transmitted to the API), but it works.

Soul Mate

Soul Mate is a dating app revolving around the Tinder's concept of date ideas. Rather than just choosing a partner based on photos, you first choose an activity you enjoy and then seek someone to enjoy it with you.

Josef Richter 2023