Product Designer & Builder

Design lead with 17 years of experience. I’ve helped companies like Vodafone, T-Mobile and Medable redesign and rebuild their products from scratch. What I’m best at is cutting the bullshit: working out what a product actually needs, dropping the rest, and getting people to agree on it.

Medable — Study Participant App Concept: a row of mobile screens from the redesigned clinical-trial app

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

“I was particularly impressed by Josef’s ability to remove nonessential complexity from the product, which led to extraordinary results in user testing.”

– Timon Reinhardt
Lead PO Smart Home
at T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom

More testimonials

My Process

Good products come from a clear process, not from winging it: understand the problem properly, then design, then test – and question every step instead of trusting it. Call it Design Thinking or whatever you like; the point is to not fool yourself.

Read about my process

Selected work

Medable Clinical Trials

Medable runs decentralised clinical trials. I led the redesign of their participant app – used globally and translated into 110 languages – focusing on the self-reporting forms participants use instead of visiting their physician.

The constraint was brutal: these forms have collected data for 20–30 years, and any change, however tiny, can bias the data and invalidate a trial (average cost $2.6B, average duration 12 years). Yet a full paper form is unusable on a phone. We worked closely with scientists to find the narrow middle ground between user needs and scientific validity. It might be the most sensitive app design work there is.

Medable participant app — self-reporting form redesigned for mobile

Medable — overview of redesigned clinical-trial app screens

T-Mobile Smart Home

A new smart-home product for Deutsche Telekom / T-Mobile – a long-term project that started by introducing a design system, then rebuilding the whole product on top of it.

It revolved around “stories” – everyday situations like “turn on the lights when I come home” that work out of the box with almost zero setup. A deliberate departure from rivals that offer endless automation but no meaningful defaults.

Soul Mate

A dating app built around date ideas rather than photos: you first pick an activity you enjoy, then find someone to share it with.

Soul Mate dating app — date ideas screen

Soul Mate dating app — collage of screens

Advanced prototyping

I’m a big believer in advanced prototyping – simple but functional apps that focus on the one feature in question. It’s far cheaper to hit dead ends here than in development.

This T-Mobile prototype uses Dialogflow for speech recognition (note this is pre-AI era) and Firebase to talk between two prototypes – a phone app and a desktop app that simulates a room in an apartment. All built in Framer.

Code

I write code so I understand what I’m working with – what’s easy, what’s hard, and what developers need from me. Mostly Elixir, plus Rust, Swift and TypeScript/React.

This very site runs on Francis, a tiny Sinatra-style Elixir framework, and francis_template – a small file-based template library I wrote for it.

I also built Stock Sorted, a Shopify app for advanced inventory management that Shopify doesn’t handle natively. I wrote up one of the hard parts: why shared inventory on Shopify is harder than it looks.

More of my work is on GitHub.

Build a Twitter clone on the BEAM A step-by-step Chirp tutorial in Elixir + Francis – realtime, multi-user, zero external infrastructure.