Resume
Michael Blakely
Principal Product Designer
Principal product designer with 15+ years shaping complex enterprise and consumer experiences. Aligns teams around a clear product vision and carries ideas from discovery through delivery. Combines systems thinking, hands-on design and mentoring with recent AI-native building.
Experience
Charter Communications (Spectrum)2017–2026
Principal II Product Designer
- Intake Engine · AI product development. Conceived and built a personal/external functional, LLM-powered conversational prototype that helps subject matter experts clarify requirements through contextual questions and structured outputs.
- Designed bounded agentic behavior with adaptive conversations, model-selected tools and persistent records, using Anthropic API, Supabase and Claude in VS Code.
- Partnered with Design Technology on hardening Charter’s in-house implementation: investigated issues against the codebase, created Jira stories, and identified needs and proposed changes, with Design Technology and engineering retaining assessment, review and merge authority.
- TechMobile Refresh · Android field-service experience. Led program scoping and stakeholder alignment, coordinating design and research leads, Product, FieldOps and Ascendion engineering.
- Connected six design sprints to Agile delivery and brought vendor teams into solution shaping. Resolved technical implementation conflicts with the Design Lead to preserve design intent.
- The redesign drew on team research spanning 40 interviews and 15 usability tests.
- 97.1% job-close success, up from 89.7%; 86.2% activation success, up from 81.0%. Director-reported program results alongside broader product, process, backend and organizational changes.
- Agent OS redesign · Customer-service platform. Led design direction and day-to-day operations across four Agent OS teams, coordinating design, research, content, Customer Operations and engineering.
- Designed and prototyped call-reason and outage-credit experiences. Partnered with engineering on billing comparison and helped shape a hub-and-spoke navigation framework.
- Established research-to-delivery cycles and shared prototype standards within the design system. Partnered with accessibility specialists on reviews and low-vision testing toward WCAG AA.
EvidenceCase Study
UX/UI product design contractor
Leadership and Mentoring
Charter Communications (Spectrum)
- Coached Agent OS design leads in strategy, prototyping and sprint facilitation; shifted design review into teams and handled escalations to remove a central review bottleneck.
- Served in a roughly one-year interim management assignment for seven designers and two content strategists. Led one-on-ones, work allocation and onboarding, partnering with discipline managers.
- Reorganized work into flexible pods and documented decisions for the incoming manager. Led two intern cohorts through concepts, design work and presentations.
Selected Consulting Engagements
Lead UX Architect · Freelance and contract work
EvidenceWork Samples
Disney Parks and Resorts Online
Led design teams for the 2009 online marketing campaign, connecting brand strategy with contextual inquiry, personas and annotated wireframes. Presented concepts to executives and mentored colleagues in user-centered design.
Cisco Systems
Established user-centered design practices within the development lifecycle and trained a UX team of 10. Led exploration for an integrated commerce workspace, created interaction patterns and reviewed agency work across releases.
Toyota via Saatchi & Saatchi LA
Led seven designers on an enterprise factory-configuration tool. Set UX strategy, mentored the team in interaction design and Axure, managed scope and adapted deliverables to Agile development.
Riot Games
Led a nine-person team exploring a League of Legends companion app. Built approximately 12 Axure prototypes and partnered with visual design and offshore iOS development to test and refine concepts.
Selected clients
Selected Capabilities and Tools
- Design and leadership
- Product strategy, complex systems, information architecture, interaction design, research-led discovery, usability testing, design systems, accessible design, cross-functional leadership and mentoring.
- Hands-on tools
- Axure, Figma Make, Claude, Anthropic API, Supabase, VS Code and Jira. AI product flows, functional prototypes and AI-assisted development.
Education
- Master of Science · Instructional TechnologyUtah State University
- Bachelor of Science · Organizational DevelopmentBrigham Young University–Hawaii