Past work — the fine print
Twenty years.
Every size
of company.
Events, surveys, observability, now wine. Different industry every time, same job: move the number that mattered.
History rhymes
I started as a programmer at a British academic publishing company, of all places, writing its intranet. Since then I've been a developer at a mining company, the UX lead at an event registration SaaS company, the customer-experience manager at a survey tool company, a co-founder of a user monitoring tool, and a Sr. design manager at one of the biggest names in tech. Just about every size of company there is, and a different industry each time.
The titles and companies changed, but the core of the job didn't: Work out what people are trying to do, find where the product gets in their way, and ship improvements that impact real people.
Cisco · Splunk · VictorOps
2018–2024 · Sr. UX Design Manager - AI, Core Platform & Strategic Projects
Before Splunk bought SignalFx, I built the vision for what the company's observability could become: a modern stack that pulled metrics, logs, and traces together with the power of Splunk behind them, well past the incident alerting VictorOps was known for at the time. The presentation did its job. It helped convince leadership to go ahead with the acquisition, a deal worth a billion dollars.
Later, when Cisco bought Splunk, I was asked to align the AI work across both companies: where it overlapped, where the gaps were, and where the whole thing should head. My team and I created comprehensive guidance for how every team should implement the then-new AI Assistants, bringing consistency and reducing development times.
The part I'm proudest of, though, wasn't in a product. It was the team I built and kept together. Through 2020 and 2021, while the rest of tech was hemorrhaging talent, my team didn't lose a single person. I'd built the kind of place people didn't want to leave, with the practices to give my reports real visibility and room to grow.
"It was the first time in my career that I had a manager who genuinely cared about my growth."
— Sophia Tarzaban, Senior Product Designer, Splunk
More, on request
The Splunk & Cisco AI work.
Vision videos for a unified security and observability experience, an AI design kit that gave every product one language to speak, war-room mockups for AI-assisted incident response, and the gap analysis that shaped where the AI roadmap went. I keep the detail off the open web, but I'm happy to walk you through it.
"One of Dan's most notable accomplishments is his ability to unify AI strategies across the company."
— yiyun zhu, Senior Product Design Manager, Splunk
Alchemer · SurveyGizmo
2014–2018 · Sr. Manager, Customer Experience
When I joined the company as the sole designer and product expert, the company's Net Promoter Score was at an all-time low of 1.8. People were frustrated, and they were leaving. I spent two and a half years rebuilding the product's experience around what customers were asking for, and the score climbed to an incredible 58.8.
By the end, more than half of the users we surveyed named the experience their favorite thing about the product, and churn was down. It's the cleanest before-and-after in my salaried years, so it gets a pretty chart.
"The organization started referring to any interface Dan hadn't yet redesigned as needing to be 'Dan-ified.' His UIs meant a reduction in support and a higher customer NPS."
— Bri Hillmer, Principal Technical Writer, Splunk
Before that
UserNova. I co-founded it and owned the product and the design. The founder's instinct I lean on now started here, with no one else to hand the hard part to.
Active Network · RegOnline. I led UX for the event-registration software organizers used to run conferences, races, and big public events. High volume, high stakes, and unforgiving the morning a form breaks on a sold-out event.
Vulcan Materials. This is where I found my love of creating beautiful interfaces. Mining companies are not exactly known for amazing internal tools, but working as a programmer here let me take the worst of old VBA-coded forms and make them pretty and usable.
Blackwell Publishing. A bit too far back to put on a resume, but I did my first intranet coding here and fell hard for web standards, clean front-end code, and British snacks.