I am a digital product builder who focuses on the intersection of design, engineering and business strategy.
Previously, I led the digital product and design team at Glossier, worked on a myriad of efforts and product teams at Facebook, and was one of the first designers on the Instagram team.
When not building things, I like to spend time helping others with their careers and their teams, and advising their businesses.
Personal Website →
@miekd on Threads →
@miekd.com on BlueSky →
Here is a brief history of what I have been up to professionally in the last decade and a half.
In 2021, I joined Brex as a Principal Designer and Design Director. The theme of my role here is “Special Projects” (big opportunities that we believe will have a meaningfully positive effect on our customers).
So far, I have led the genesis and growth of our Mobile product and team, and have focused on our career frameworks, hiring practices, and growing our design team to a healthy ratio within the business.
Now I lead two of our organizations that focus on Empower. You can read some more thoughts in Joining Brex.
In October of 2019 I took a break from being in a full-time role to take some rest, watch some movies, play some video games, and read some books. I did spend a little bit of time on advising, investing, and exploring new projects.
Towards the end of 2020 I wanted to go back to where I started my career, which was as a hybrid designer slash front-end developer. So I dug deeper into modern web technologies, brushing up on over half a decade of new ways of working, and explored photo sharing and photo hosting by building out different iterations of Shoebox.
As Head of Digital Product and Design at Glossier, I helped transform the digital product management and design team, by hiring some amazing people to the product and design team, focusing the team on driving measurable results, and creating a brand new design system.
At Facebook I worked at the intersection of design and product strategy, leading a re-design of the search engine, supporting multiple efforts on the local team (including a prototype of hyperlocal with bluetooth beacons), and leading the product experimentation team.
As one of the earliest members of the Instagram team, I worked as a designer (and sometimes engineer) — most notably on: redesigning instagram.com (including our move to React), and re-designing for iOS7.
As design co-founder, I led all of the design and creative efforts, as well as general company strategy — shifting us through our transformation from a web studio to focus on apps and games across web and mobile.