Alex Greene, Product Designer

the pot on my desk that holds all of my pens and pencils

My career has been in startups: environments where the hardest part isn't building, but identifying the path forward. I'm drawn to teams that don't have it all figured out, but are excited to get there.

I ask questions to uncover constraints, balance data with instincts, and push for the kind of honesty and transparency that keeps a team learning as fast as it's working. My engineering background helps me effectively lead projects—collaborating across teams and thinking logically about product requirements. My style leans towards the human, whimsical, and uncomplicated, but what I care about most is seeing the signal through the noise.

Hiring? I'm looking to join a new team, let's chat!

Recent work

Explored the intersection of AI and Commerce at Arcade.ai

Arcade lets interior designers and home decor enthusiasts dream up a product and instantly order it from an artisan who can bring it to life. As Founding Product Designer, I led design and user research across the company’s early product developments. I translated ambiguous direction into concrete experiences my product and engineering partners could execute on, including an overhauled creation experience and new workflows for editing designs.

Arcade takes a prompt for a decor / jewelry product and turns it into a design which can be commissioned from a real Maker.

Previous Work

Designed tools for designers at Play

Play is a superpowered tool for designing mobile apps. I worked on both the iOS and macOS apps, unlocking native features for designers like Charts, Menus, and Dynamic Type. I led projects like Code Export and Monetization, working closely with engineers and researching Apple's documentation.

Digitized A Pattern Language, a favorite book

In the book, author Christopher Alexander describes 200+ design patterns for building homes, towns and cities. I wanted to re-imagine the dense book in a way that's easier to reference, or even extend in the future for adding more patterns of my own—which the author encourages.

The table of contents demonstrates relationships between patterns. When a pattern is selected, edges connect to all related patterns.

Created Logger , an app to replace all tracking apps

Frustrated with the mobile interface of spreadsheet software and the rigid nature of personal tracking apps, I redesigned them entirely. The result was a data collection tool flexible enough to track anything: health, entertainment, personal growth...

screenshot of the template selection screen of my app, Logger.

screenshot of the template editing screen of my app, Logger.

screenshot of the prompt editing screen of my app, Logger.

Built models to detect toxic content at Spectrum Labs

As a founding engineer, I bootstrapped machine learning models to detect harmful conversation in online communities, working through linguistic, technical, and design challenges. I designed notebooks for data exploration, and client dashboards for visualizing conversational health.

Other things I've done...

Acquired & redesigned Intermission

A macOS toolbar app that reminds you to take breaks from looking at your screen.

Built App Scout

Unreleased tool for aggregating listings of online businesses for sale.

Created WikiQuiz

Generated quizzes from Wikipedia pages using natural language parsing.

Developed novel applications

From 2009 to 2012, I published novelty iOS apps that accumulated 200k+ downloads.

Various arts & crafts

Recently I've been teaching myself printmaking. I also love to sketch-—I almost always put pen to paper when exploring ideas. From time to time, I create pennants.