# Mike MacDonald

> Mike MacDonald is a principal product designer and design engineer with 20+ years taking products from 0 to 1. Four-time founding designer, founder of Herding Cats, previously designed the agent surfaces at Contio.

In his own words: “I’ve been building web and mobile products for twenty-plus years, usually as the first or only designer in the room. Four founding-designer runs taught me to care about the business as much as the pixels. Shipping 70+ PRs at Contio and a whole company at Herding Cats taught me that the fastest route to a good design is a working one. I’m based in Meridian, Idaho, and I’m open to principal product design roles at startups and AI companies.”

Experience:

- Apr 2026 – Present: Founder, Herding Cats. Founded and solo-built an agentic operating system for touring dance competitions using frontier AI tooling. Live on web, iOS and Android, with active design partners.
- Mar 2025 – Nov 2026: Principal Product Designer, Contio. Founding and sole designer for an AI platform that built institutional knowledge from meetings. Designed every agent surface, moved the team from Figma handoffs to designing in code, shipped 70+ PRs.
- Jan 2024 – Mar 2025: Senior UI/UX Designer, Markmonitor. Ground-up redesign of an enterprise domain-management and brand-protection platform used by 70% of the world’s 50 most-trafficked websites.
- Feb 2022 – Mar 2023: Product Designer & Product Owner, Ventive. Owned discovery and roadmaps for client web and mobile products; $1.3M in concurrent annual budgets.
- 2019: Director of User Experience, Kribbz. Founding designer; led design, front-end engineering and launch of an online real estate platform.
- 2018 – 2019: Head of UX & Design, gap intelligence. gap’s first designer; a web app overhaul saved analysts about 500 hours a year; surveyed enterprise customers including Apple and Samsung.
- 2017 – 2018: UX Manager, MD Revolution. Led a large-scale user research campaign; designed the first version of the RevUp iOS app.
- 2015 – 2017: Product Designer, MyTotalHealth. Brand revamp, web and iOS app redesign; a 35-point NPS lift and a six-figure Nestlé investment.
- 2013 – 2015: Lead UX Designer & UX Coach, App’d Mobile. Sole UX designer and mentor for 24 program participants’ iOS and Android apps.
- 2002 – Present: Founder, EmpireNine. Design and development studio: web, UX/UI, CRO, SEO and branding for dozens of clients.

Expertise:

- 0→1, as the founding designer: Four founding-designer runs and one bootstrapped company. Comfortable being the whole design org from the first commit to the app store.
- AI-native and agent UX: Multi-turn agents, human-in-the-loop review, generative UI and probabilistic systems, woven into the product instead of bolted on.
- Design engineering: I design in code: React, TypeScript, Storybook. 70+ production PRs at Contio; every view at Herding Cats.
- Mobile and B2B SaaS: Native iOS and Android, enterprise portals, and the design systems that keep them consistent as they grow.

Skills: 0-to-1 product design, AI-native and agent UX, Conversational and generative UI, Human-in-the-loop design, Designing for probabilistic systems, Design engineering, Prototyping in code, Design systems, Interaction design, Information architecture, User research and usability testing, Accessibility, B2B SaaS and enterprise, Mobile (iOS and Android), Branding, CRO, Product ownership, Design leadership and mentoring, Cross-functional partnership with product and engineering.

Tools: Figma, Storybook, Lottie, HTML and CSS, React, TypeScript, Node.js, Swift, Xcode, Tailwind, SCSS, Git and GitHub, REST APIs, WordPress, Remotion, Kling, Claude Code, Claude Design, Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor, Codex, MCP and tool-calling agents.

## Case studies

- [Herding Cats](https://mike.fyi/work/herding-cats): An agentic operating system for touring dance competitions. Staffing, flights, hotels, equipment, merch and finance for touring dance competitions, in one AI-native system. Founded and solo-built; live on web, iOS and Android.
- [Contio](https://mike.fyi/work/contio): Agent surfaces for Contio, the AI meeting platform that turns what gets said into what gets done. Founding and sole product designer from zero to launch. Multi-turn agent chat, human-in-the-loop review, Canvases that turn a conversation into a first draft, Next Steps that send it where the work lives, and bot-free meeting capture, designed in code and shipped across web, desktop, iOS and Android.
- [Kribbz](https://mike.fyi/work/kribbz): Sell a house as-is, for cash, in 72 hours. Founding designer for an online real estate platform: brand, research, web and iOS product design, plus a stint as interim director of software development.
- [MyGiHealth](https://mike.fyi/work/mygihealth): Helping patients understand their gut, with two of the world’s top gastroenterologists. Rebranded MyTotalHealth’s family of products, redesigned the iOS and web apps, and built the pitch deck that won a six-figure investment from Nestlé Health Science.

## Contact

- [Email](mailto:mike@mike.fyi)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikegmac/)
- [Résumé (PDF)](https://mike.fyi/resume.pdf)
- [Résumé (Markdown)](https://mike.fyi/resume.md)
- [Résumé (JSON Resume)](https://mike.fyi/resume.json)

## Optional

- [Full text of every case study](https://mike.fyi/llms-full.txt)