Product Design Leader

Ryan Higgins

Clarity for complex products.

I design enterprise and FinTech products where being wrong is expensive. I'm AI-native, with 15 years of craft underneath it. What I bring depends on what the moment needs: sharper product strategy, better design, or the agents that help a whole team move faster.

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Portfolio

Selected Work

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Accessibility · AI · Native iOS

Creator · Designer · Builder

Fathom

AI visual assistance for blind and low-vision people, now on the App Store.

Designed and built a native iOS app that gives blind and low-vision people real-time awareness, indoor wayfinding, and step-by-step task help — no maps, no beacons, no sighted guide. ~50K lines of production Swift, shipped solo to the App Store with agentic design workflows.

Product Design

Staff Product Designer · Chatham Financial

Portfolio Dashboard

Delivering clarity for billion-dollar portfolios under urgent stakes.

Built a net-new product to replace email and spreadsheets for institutional investors — consolidating debt and derivatives performance data for the first time. Launched in 12 weeks, adopted by five flagship clients, and grew into a multi-product suite.

Brand Campaign · Product Design

Product Design Lead · Chatham Financial

Call the Cup

A CEO challenge turned into a brand-defining engagement play in three weeks.

Won a competitive UX jam to design and build a World Cup bracket game on cf.com — introducing the Heart/Head/Hedge mechanic, generating the hero video in Veo, building the frontend with Claude Code and Cursor, and launching an Appcues campaign across the platform.

AI / Human-in-the-Loop

UX Lead · Chatham Financial

AI Document Extraction

Scaling complex loan data extraction with AI and human-in-the-loop design.

Designed a multi-step AI extraction workflow that reduced loan contract processing from hours to minutes — embedding institutional knowledge into a scalable, compliant platform.

Education · Faculty

Adjunct Faculty · Curriculum Developer

Curriculum Development & Teaching

Shaping the next generation of designers through evolving, real-world curriculum.

Redesigned three university courses around web standards, design systems, and enterprise UX — moving away from outdated Flash-based content. Hundreds of graduates now working in fintech and design systems roles, several hired directly onto professional teams.

About

I design for high-stakes clarity.

Seven of my years have been in FinTech, where everything is regulated, audited, and dense with data. I'm most energized when the problem is messy.

More about me View Résumé

15+Years in Enterprise Design

AI-NativePractice & Team Tooling

A11YAccessibility-First Design

100sDesign Students Mentored