<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/21/technology-202-online-disinformation-has-changed-now-dnc-is-updating-its-response-unit/" target="_blank">The Technology 202: Online disinformation has changed. Now the DNC is updating its response unit.</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">Washington Post</font>

The Technology 202: Online disinformation has changed. Now the DNC is updating its response unit. - Washington Post

<a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/trending/trending-globally/apple-airpods-max-price-case-design-memes-7097686/" target="_blank">Memes about Apple’s latest headphones AirPods Max take social media by storm</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">The Indian Express</font>

Memes about Apple’s latest headphones AirPods Max take social media by storm - The Indian Express

New York University

Trinity College-Hartford

Head of Audio Product at The New York Times

New York, New York, United States

Leading a 90+ person Product and Design team and bringing a product-centered approach to driving growth for the business. Building products and experiences that help readers better understand the world around them by connecting them to quality journalism worth paying for through world class digital products.

The New York Times

Head of Product & Design

Part of a small and scrappy team that brought a smart intercom to market  that allows people to have instant rich conversations with the people they care about most , whether they’re in another room in the same house, in a completely different location (Hi mom!) or on the move on their mobile devices. 

Responsible for the entire brand experience across hardware and software including: establishing our brand identity, package design, interface design, sound design and marketing collateral.

Nucleus Intercom

VP of Product

30 Weeks is an experimental program – part incubator, part educator - that gives talented designers the hands-on experience, mentorship, critiques, tools, workspace, and connection to the communities they need to create impactful products and companies. The program is operated by Google and Hyper Island in partnership with the best design schools in New York City.

As Designer in Residence, I spent time every week with all 21 designers to help them achieve their product/company vision, connect them to the broader design community in NYC and build a design culture and process that they'll be able to take with them when the program is over. Getting to work deeply on such a wide variety of products while also getting to play product therapist was an incredibly rewarding experience. 

The semester culminated with a fantastic Demo Night where the designers got to show off all their works to an audience of 200+ people. 

You can learn more about the program here: <a href="https://www.30weeks.com/">https://www.30weeks.com/</a>

Google

Designer in Residence, 30 Weeks - Google's Incubator for Design Founders

While the devices that people wear daily have gotten better at generating more and more data, they still all continue to fall short at giving people true meaning and a clear path to improvement. We set out to build a wrist-worn wearable that generated clinically relevant data and an app that helped users make sense of that data. This required incredibly tight collaboration between R&D, Hardware, Firmware, Engineering, Data, Marketing and Design.

Unfortunately, 6 months from launch, the company wasn’t able to continue and the product never made it to market. As my first foray into shipping a hardware product I learned a ton about the complexities inherent to hardware.

Head of Design

Working with companies on product design and product process/org design. That can take multiple forms  - driving an entire product lifecycle from concept to launch, developing a roadmap that supports the company vision and business goals, building or scaling a design-driven and data-informed product organization, establishing processes that suited each company and finally being a coach and mentor to team members.

Digging in with multiple companies - from startup to Fortune 500 - at the same time was incredibly stimulating and provided a different kind of learning experience than going deep on one problem for years. One of the most valuable things about it was being able to see patterns across different organizations and take lessons from one to another.

Tinker Studio

Independent Product Consultant

Helped bring the company from 10 people to 150 as we relentlessly shipped and evolved the product from what many considered a “check-in game” to the future of smart mobile software and personalized local discovery.

I built a product team from scratch that included product management, designers, user research and platform/developer tools. As the company grew quickly I helped shape and re-shape our team structures and cross-team creative processes. I scaled the team and our strategy in order to support our always aggressive product development goals as well as a product that evolved quite a bit over the years as we created the building blocks to get us closer to our long term vision.

foursquare

Head of Product

This was my first opportunity to lead a large creative team that included ux, ui and motion designers and ensure that they were set up to do their best work as well as grow professionally. I was also the creative lead on all of our new business engagements which was an awesome exercise in honing a creative process that could generate and execute on great ideas in a short period of time.

Schematic

VP, User Experience Design

At IconNicholson I got the chance to call upon my background in engineering, design and product development along with my experience working with various platforms. I helped clients realize ways that they could leverage new technologies in their business in order to best meet their goals while providing a thoughtful and engaging user experience.

-  Bring expertise in mobile, social and emerging technologies to existing and prospective clients
-  Establish and lead new internal research and trendwatching initiatives

Icon Nicholson/LBi International

Creative Strategist - Mobile, Social and Emerging Technologies

After having spent years designing and building for digital interfaces, I wanted to get exposure and experience with the design process for the physical objects that often house them. Working as a researcher at ecco while I was getting my master's degree at NYU afforded me the opportunity to work on the intersection of form and function and get a glimpse at a part of the design process that was, until then, foreign to me.

-  Client work included new product research for Virgin, Epson and Toyota/Scion

ECCO Design

Product Design Researcher (graduate internship)

dodgeball began as a master’s thesis project exploring the changes in social dynamics when you can empower users to use their mobile devices for more than just point-to-point communication. We gave ourselves six months to take the product and turn it into jobs for ourselves. After developing a business plan and talking to a variety of VCs, we decided that taking the product to Google would best allow us to realize our vision for the future of dodgeball.

We set out to build a product that everyone, not just smartphone users, could use so we focused on text messaging as the platform. Despite having a small team, we spent a lot of time talking to our users and establishing a close, accessible relationship early on which resulted in an incredibly loyal set of users who who cared deeply about what we were building and stuck with us until the end.

Co-founder dodgeball.com (sold to Google in 2005)

While attending graduate school, I worked on projects for IBM and Verizon Wireless that involved frequent interaction with, and presenting to, the clients.

-  Through an iterative design process and extensive user research, developed the user interface for Verizon's next generation mobile phones

R/GA

Senior Interaction Designer (freelance)

Introduced Interaction Design as a formal discipline into the Gotham process, serving as a liason between Technology, Design and Business Development for clients such as AOL Time Warner, Hughes, Much Music and Deutsche Telekom.

-  Led the Interaction Design for a project to build a broadband consumer portal, creating six different content channels based on varying interests

Gotham Broadband

Senior Interaction Designer

Worked first as a developer and then as an information architect developing solutions for clients including HBO, Charles Schwab, Palm, KPMG, JPMorgan and Christie's.

-  Architected an application for a wireless home internet appliance, working closely with industrial designers
-  Created solutions for interactive television, taking into consideration the digital and physical interfaces and their limitations

Alex Rainert