When we make better things for human beings,
we make being human, better.
Values
Quality
I'm a maker, a problem solver, a solutionnaire. I commit myself to work I love: conscientious, consistent, creative design for human beings.
Clarity
Great design is clear communication. Thoughtful, kind, and nearly invisible. Designing for clarity takes much more effort, and it's always worth it.
Curiosity
Life gives us ~80 years of self discovery. Let's go exploring.
Focus
Essential to creativity is presence of mind. Rather than multi-tasking, I focus deeply on one thing at a time, and find my flow.
Transparency
Cut the bullshit. Tell the truth. Have more fun. Assume the best in yourself and everyone around you.

Word on the street

Julie Mathers

VP of product design & UX
"Mark is an incredibly talented designer, product thinker, and visionary. He has a deep understanding of tech, design, product, and business. He's passionate about understanding user needs, has a strong intuition, great attention to detail, and excels at solving end to end design challenges. I worked with Mark on many vision and strategy projects: unifying a platform, bridging fragmented workflows, and innovating native mobile applications."

Vlad Gorshkov

Sr Manager of Design
"Mark joined at the time when the company had no understanding of user experience or good design. Through his continuous interactions with the right directors and executives, he helped the young UX team find a direction, process, and a vision. Mark brought amazing energy, sense of importance to interaction design and incredible design solutions for our customers."

Stu Thompson

Principal Software Architect
"Mark is one of the unique thinkers in this world. Able to see past the obvious answers, Mark delivers creative and intuitive solutions that are both fresh and yet instantly familiar. One of the most striking things about working with Mark is how often his work and his ideas are emulated by those around him. His spark and passion energizes those around him and his contributions become a positive force on any team he works with."

Brian Lamka

Director of Product Management
"Working with Mark was great. He fundamentally believes in solving for outcomes vs outputs, and this guides every step of his design process. He is logical, organized, and very thorough in his work. He has an ownership mentality, which I've found to be surprisingly rare in my career. And, perhaps most important, his attitude and sense of humor made the long hours we spent together on this project a lot of fun. Mark epitomizes my ideal design leader."

Jeanne Bard

Sr. Manager, UX Research
"Mark Iris is an excellent product designer with an unmatched ability to ideate and innovate at a prolific pace. Already a highly skilled designer and product visionary, I’m especially impressed with his dedication to continue learning and improving. As both a product designer and a collaborator, Mark has my highest recommendation."

Seema Chaudry

Director of UX
"Mark is one of the sharpest minds in any room he's present. I have seen him provide insight into usability issues that is on point and leads to significant improvements. He's very detail oriented and communicates his thought process very well. When presenting designed solutions, he always has alternative designs and explorations as examples for discussion - a sign of a good designer with a holistic approach to his work."

Sergey Ivashov

Sr. Director, Growth & Analytics
"Mark is an amazing mobile product manager with a keen sense for design details. What makes him truly stand out, is that he has managed to find the right balance between understanding customer needs, pushing the boundaries with design to delight the customer, and is able to convince engineering that the huge obstacle they see is just a minor roadblock that can be overcome with creativity."

Cameron Mayer

Chief Technology Officer
"Mark is a talented and insightful individual who has been a significant positive influence on eBay's mobile apps, both in terms of Product Management and Interaction Design. Definitely an "A-Player," and a pleasure to work with."

Shawn Piper

Team Manager, UX Design
"Mark is one of those rare and exceptional individuals who exceeds at just about everything he does. Mark regularly goes beyond the traditional constraints of product management with his ideation, first-principles thinking, and creative talents. Combined with his technical competencies, Mark is a bit of a superstar."
I operate at the intersection of complex platform architecture, user behavior strategy, and deep design craftsmanship. For over 15 years, I’ve pioneered product vision across consumer and enterprise software ecosystems, specializing in unifying data-heavy interfaces, designing foundational template page frameworks, and scaling collaborative UX practices from the ground up.

Extremely capable of going 0-1 on new opportunities and modernizing legacy systems for what's coming next.My approach balances high-level executive design strategy with meticulous execution to ship elegant, scalable solutions for billions of dollars in commercial impact. Here is what I bring to organizations:

• Core Platform Architecture: Conceptualizing and delivering the "floor plans," template constructions, and robust design systems that form the backbone of complex product portfolios.

• High-Impact UX Strategy: Linking user value metrics directly to executive priorities, conversion funnel optimization, and CLV.

• Cross-Disciplinary Leadership: Recruiting and scaling high-performance teams, mentoring elite ICs, and building rigorous frameworks for generative research and rapid prototyping.

• Storytelling and narrative crafting: Finding the strongest signal in the noise, crafting inspired visions for companies and teams to rally behind.
Paylocity
May 2023 - current
Distinguished Product Designer
Current
Orchestrating executive-level experience strategy and platform modernization, positioning the enterprise portfolio for the next $billion ARR, future-ready scale and AI-native efficiency.

• 5-Year Product Vision: Rearchitected, designed, and validated the foundational 5-year strategic vision of the platform to unify complex product silos into a cohesive ecosystem.

• AI Strategy Leadership: Conducting generative AI product design strategy, pioneering AI-powered workflows that transform antiquated user paradigms into intuitive, automated experiences.

• Next-Gen Lifecycle Output: Pioneering AI-assisted design lifecycles internally, integrating advanced generative research and prototyping tools to unlock unprecedented velocity, speed-to-market, and prolific output.

• Enterprise Frameworks: Standardizing template page constructions and macro-level layout architecture to establish a highly unified enterprise design system.

• Core Product Systems Design: Designing core framework models for high-density reporting engines, workspace setup tools, and modern enterprise platform patterns.
United Parks & Entertainment
dec 2020 - July 2023
Head of User Experience
2 yrs, 8 mos
Built and led the UX design practice for a massive digital transformation across 12+ theme parks nationwide.

• Platform Modernization: Stood up a comprehensive corporate design system and a templated CMS/marketing website engine to unify the brand's digital ecosystem.

• Omnichannel Delivery: Launched native mobile applications and digital/physical on-location guest experiences.

• Business Outcomes: Closely collaborated with Product & Engineering executives to directly optimize conversion funnels, increase monetization, and boost CLV.
Hinge Health
Apr 2020 - Dec 2020
Principal Product Designer
9 MOs
Drove early-stage product discovery and foundational compliance design for the platform’s highest-priority medical program expansions.

• Product Discovery: Led complex end-to-end design discovery and system concepts for the platform’s critical, next-generation Acute and Perisurgical care programs.

• Design System Pioneering: Conceptualized, built, and launched the foundational architecture for the enterprise's design system pilot program.

• Accessibility Compliance: Orchestrated a massive internal infrastructure sweep to systematically upgrade web and native mobile application ecosystems to rigorous WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility compliance standards.
Cvent
jun 2017 - Apr 2020
UX Director, Strategic Initiatives
2 yrs, 3 mos
Steered product architecture and global design systems for a massive multi-product enterprise platform while rapidly scaling organizational design capacity.

• Platform Standardization: Reimagined and unified the enterprise global navigation and layout framework, collapsing fragmented silos into a single, cohesive user experience. A complete reimagining of the platform.

• Core Product Frameworks: Served as the Product Owner and lead architect for the enterprise Content Creation Framework—a foundational core engine powering over 15 distinct corporate products.

• Team Scale & Governance: Scaled and structured a high-performing global UX team from 20 to 65+ full-time employees, managing and mentoring elite individual tracks.

• Expansive Product Discovery & Integration: Directed the rapid UX redesign and tool-builder integration of key multi-million dollar mobile platform acquisitions (QuickMobile & DoubleDutch), successfully doubling the platform’s mobile workforce capabilities.
Principal UX Designer
8 mos
UX, UI Designer and PO for Cvent's Content Creation Framework, which is the backbone of over 15 individual products. Core contributor to the design system, conceptualized & led mobile app redesign and mobile app builder as we acquired QuickMobile and DoubleDutch, doubling our mobile work force, and many other projects and initiatives.
Walmart labs
Dec 2015 - Jun 2017
Sr. UX Architect, E2E
1 yr 1 mo
Orchestrated internal R&D design groups to discover & invent next-generation shopping mechanics while scaling multi-billion dollar core mobile & web e-commerce applications.

• E-Commerce R&D: Handpicked to lead an internal, multi-disciplinary squad of 5 to discover, design, and validate net-new digital commerce paradigms to Discover new tech-driven commerce opportunities, systematically drive high-impact customer experiences and long-term retention metrics.

• Mobile Scale & Optimization: Served as the solo UX architect directing the entire Sam's Club native iOS and Android application platforms, scaling optimization for a massive chunk of Walmart's overall mobile volume.

• End-to-End Control Systems: Redesigned fundamental mobile architecture including global search, smart filtering engines, personalized home screens, and market-leading exploratory interaction models and monetization funnels (Club Pickup and Scan & Go).

• Physical & Digital: Pioneered systems & service design initiatives that blend the physical (in store) and digital (on device) demand, discovery, and delivery experience.
Sr. UX Architect, Mobile
7 Mos
Sole UX designer on the Sam’s Club apps for iOS and Android, phone and tablet. Projects included IA and navigation redesign, search, sort and filter, home Screen, Club Pickup, Scan & Go, promotions, accounts, and many more. I was also able to dabble in service design with store operations, in-store technology like beacons and kiosks, and associate-facing applications.
ebay
Dec 2010 - Dec 2015
Sr. Product Designer, HomE, Personalization, Engagement
1 yr 1 mo
Executed an incredible cross-functional career track moving from software quality engineering, to mobile product management, and ultimately to strategic UX design ownership over a $29B+ mobile marketplace ecosystem.

• Engagement Infrastructure: Owned end-to-end design strategy for high-traffic core domains across web, mobile web, iOS, and Android ecosystems, including the Homepage, Collections, and Personalized User Feeds.

• System Consolidation: Conceived and launched the global "Engagement Mechanics" framework, unifying 20+ separate legacy engagement signals and micro-interactions into one streamlined cross-platform structure.

• The $29B Mobile Architecture: Spearheaded, designed, and directed the massive global launch of the eBay 4.0 overhaul across all primary smartphone and tablet channels, facilitating over $29B in transaction volume.

• Scale-to-Market Quality: Defined and authored the original, global cross-platform mobile quality standards and metrics for eBay Mobile during the formative years of early smartphone commerce.
Sr. Product Manager, Mobile User Experience
1 yr 2 mos
Initiated, concepted and directed the eBay 4.0 redesign effort across iPhone, iPad, Android & MobileWeb platforms enabling over $29B in mobile commerce in 2014. The effort led to a global application launch and required tight collaboration with most global product teams, marketing, customer service, core sites and services, and many more. In this role I also served as the steward of cross-platform design and UX coherence.
Product Manager, Android App
2 yrs 1 mo
Product owner for the Android app as it reached 140MM total downloads, avg. 88k/week, 4.5 star rating, and over $9B in mobile commerce in 2014. Created, designed and managed implementation of new features with 5 agile teams, ran A/B tests and iterated on existing features. Helped interview, hire, and scale the Android team to 40+ employees.
Program Manager, Android App
10 mos
PgM at eBay is basically a Project Manager but over multiple domains. As the team’s first PgM, I created the SDLC process, helped hire and onboard 20+ FTEs, maintained release schedules, managed service, engineering and design dependencies, reported product health, timeline, and team status to management, scheduled and led team meetings, stand ups and feature meetings, built and maintained wikis and bug databases.
Software Engineer II Quality, Mobile
10 mos
Co-lead on a team of 10 QEs, managing tasks, test cases and test planning, rote and performed exhaustive global test plans. Since mobile was new I helped define quality metrics and standards for mobile testing at eBay, directly triaged service outages and customer reports and ensured consistent functionality across Web, Android & iOS phone and tablet apps.
Critical Path Software
July 2010 - Dec 2010
Quality Assurance Engineer
6 mos
Mostly black box testing and bug reporting on popular mobile apps in the very early days of iPhone. Worked on Chegg, Expedia, and eBay apps for iPhone and iPad. CPS was acquired by eBay soon after joining. Great timing.
etc
Jul 2006 - Jul 2010
Prior to the Tech I worked in Music, Television, Marketing, and Graphic Design, while “Kerouac-ing” my way through New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, and eventually landing in Portland.
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