ME // Mike Erickson

ME // Mike Erickson

ME // Mike Erickson

Product Design Leader

Building design organizations that last

Executive product design leader. 20 years building design organizations from the inside out, most recently at Teradata. Looking for the next hard problem where the org, the practice, and the product all need to move together.

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Building a team

6 to 45 people

Scaled the design org from 6 people to a multidisciplinary team that peaked at 50 and at 45 when I departed

Healthy culture

3% attrition

Voluntary attrition over seven years, through layoffs, leadership turnover, and the toughest hiring market in the last decade

Cost savings

$1M / year

External research consulting replaced with an always-on, in-house capability. Savings reinvested into the team

Design quality

Scorecards

A six-principle design scorecard that removed subjectivity from quality assessment

How I Work

How I lead and what I'm known for

Building and keeping great teams

Scaling a team is the easy part. Keeping it together through layoffs, leadership turnover, and a brutal hiring market is something else.

Over the last seven years, voluntary attrition stayed near 3%. I built a career framework that produced five promotions in four years, hired roughly half the org myself, and held the culture together through near-complete senior leadership turnover. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens when people feel like the work matters and someone is paying attention.

Making design measurable and defensible

Design work that can't be measured eventually gets cut. I've spent a career making sure it doesn't.

I deployed a real-time product intelligence system that put weekly usage and NPS signals in front of 40-50 product managers, and co-developed a six-principle design scorecard applied to 12 product features in 2025, removing subjectivity from quality assessment. I defended Figma and Pendo through multiple budget reduction cycles. Not by arguing for design, but by showing what the business would lose without it.

Changing how organizations work

The hardest design problem isn't the product. It's the system around it.

I led a multi-year shift from a feature-factory model to an Empowered Teams framework across roughly 20 product areas.

That meant designing an Epic Readiness ritual that required validated discovery before engineering could begin, building a designer-to-PM pairing model that culminated in the launch of a unified hybrid multi-cloud platform, and establishing the operating rhythm that made all of it stick. The product got better because the organization got better first.

Navigating design in the AI era

I'm building with AI, not waiting for it to settle. The honest truth is the map is still being drawn, and I'd rather help draw it.

I piloted LLM integrations with Dovetail and Pendo that cut research synthesis time from weeks to days while keeping humans in the driver's seat, and started connecting AI-assisted insight retrieval directly into product team workflows. I'm also building with these tools personally, learning where they genuinely change the work and where they mostly just speed up the parts that weren't the bottleneck anyway.

Building and keeping great teams

Scaling a team is the easy part. Keeping it together through layoffs, leadership turnover, and a brutal hiring market is something else.

Over the last seven years, voluntary attrition stayed near 3%. I built a career framework that produced five promotions in four years, hired roughly half the org myself, and held the culture together through near-complete senior leadership turnover. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens when people feel like the work matters and someone is paying attention.

Changing how organizations work

The hardest design problem isn't the product. It's the system around it.

I led a multi-year shift from a feature-factory model to an Empowered Teams framework across roughly 20 product areas.

That meant designing an Epic Readiness ritual that required validated discovery before engineering could begin, building a designer-to-PM pairing model that culminated in the launch of a unified hybrid multi-cloud platform, and establishing the operating rhythm that made all of it stick. The product got better because the organization got better first.

Making design measurable and defensible

Design work that can't be measured eventually gets cut. I've spent a career making sure it doesn't.

I deployed a real-time product intelligence system that put weekly usage and NPS signals in front of 40-50 product managers, and co-developed a six-principle design scorecard applied to 12 product features in 2025, removing subjectivity from quality assessment. I defended Figma and Pendo through multiple budget reduction cycles. Not by arguing for design, but by showing what the business would lose without it.

Navigating design in the AI era

I'm building with AI, not waiting for it to settle. The honest truth is the map is still being drawn, and I'd rather help draw it.

I piloted LLM integrations with Dovetail and Pendo that cut research synthesis time from weeks to days while keeping humans in the driver's seat, and started connecting AI-assisted insight retrieval directly into product team workflows. I'm also building with these tools personally, learning where they genuinely change the work and where they mostly just speed up the parts that weren't the bottleneck anyway.

The Epic Readiness ritual changed the way our engineers thought about discovery. It moved design from a service to a partner.

former VP of Engineering, Teradata

LinkedIn

Good design doesn't happen by accident.

Neither does a great design org.

If you're building something where design needs to grow alongside the product and the organization, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. No formal process required.

Let's talk

Available For Work

Product Design Leadership · Experience Strategy · DesignOps

Based in Minneapolis, USA · Open to Hybrid & Remote

LinkedIn

Good design doesn't happen by accident.

Neither does a great design org.

If you're building something where design needs to grow alongside the product and the organization, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. No formal process required.

Let's talk

Available For Work

Product Design Leadership · Experience Strategy · DesignOps

Based in Minneapolis, USA · Open to Hybrid & Remote

LinkedIn

Good design doesn't happen by accident.

Neither does a great design org.

If you're building something where design needs to grow alongside the product and the organization, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. No formal process required.

Let's talk

Available For Work

Product Design Leadership · Experience Strategy · DesignOps

Based in Minneapolis, USA · Open to Hybrid & Remote