Ryan Lucas
I'm currently the VP of Design at Rippling in San Francisco.
I previously led design, brand, and later product at Retool, as we scaled the company from 8 people to $100M+ in revenue. Before that, I co-founded Subform, a venture-backed startup that built design and developer tools. It had a fair amount of influence... and not a lot of revenue. Further back, I led product and design at CrossFit, helping to grow the company from just a few employees into a $4B global fitness brand and a household name.
Over the years, I've designed software for AI/ML, wind farm management, weather, sports, devtools, ecommerce, data visualization, and many other domains. My work has been featured by Fast Company, Wired, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Apple. I hold a B.S. in Industrial Design from Virginia Tech.
I've always practiced a holistic model of designing, building, and marketing products. It's hard for me to pull those things apart, and I don't care much for specialization. My view of product design and development is somewhere between Max Bill and Tomás Maldonado, the Bauhaus and Ulm models. The beauty of a product is a component of its function, and the pursuit of excellence does not need justification. But it must also anchor in a rigorous, multidisciplinary, and operational approach that embraces systems thinking and commercial realities. Great products are useful, usable, desirable, and used.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, I talked with Brett Berson on First Round's Executive Function podcast about these ideas in the leadership practice.
