San Francisco, CA

Tao Ni.

Product design leader / Builder · Founder · Researcher_

16 years turning ambiguous problems into shipped products across consumer fintech, advertising, developer platforms, and enterprise SaaS — building the teams that ship them along the way.

View work→Get in touch

00 — Design & building philosophy

01

Lead with user insights and business acumen

Answer what to build and why before “how to design and build”.

02

Ship to learn, not to finish

Find the root problem → Make hypotheses → Ship to real customers → Learn.

03

Fight hard for the ground truth

Stay intellectually honest. Keep asking why until we hit the ground truth — then let go fast when we’re wrong.

04

Speed is the quality

Moving faster forces clearer thinking. Slow iteration leads to delayed learning, not deeper craft.

05

User trust is the product

Visual, interaction, and motion craft aren’t aesthetic luxuries — they are signals of legitimacy.

Creed

A loss, no bad thing.→

01 — About

A technologist who designs — and a designer who also ships code.

I'm a product design leader with 16 years of experience delivering measurable design, product, and business impact across consumer fintech, digital advertising, developer platforms, SMB, and enterprise SaaS.

I've spent eight of those years building, coaching, and developing high-performing multidisciplinary design teams — and the rest as an individual contributor who still loves to design and code. My foundation is technical: a PhD in Computer Science focused on Human–Computer Interaction, with 13 peer-reviewed publications.

Lately I'm back in build mode — blending design, product, and code with AI tools to take new ideas from zero to one.

On the name

“Tao” (道) is the Chinese principle for the way — the natural order underlying everything, and the practice of moving in harmony with it.

Favorite quote

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”
— Richard Feynman

02 — Selected Work

From paper concepts to platforms used by millions. Tap any role to expand.

  • Partnered with founders and cross-functional leaders to drive 5x ARR growth and 30 consecutive months of profitability across two flagship apps.
  • Built and scaled the design team from 2 to 7 — five product designers and two researchers — with zero attrition and three promotions in two years.
  • Founded the Grassroot Innovation program and led Catch from idea to 200K+ downloads and 100K+ MAUs within three months.

The full Kikoff case study is available on request. Reach out to Tao directly→

  • Led design and launch of Performance Max campaigns, focused on conversions and goals-based bidding.
  • Led design and launch of the Customer Acquisition goal-based bidding tool, contributing meaningful ads revenue within two quarters.
  • Both initiatives earned consecutive Google Tech Impact awards.
View case study→
  • Led a 9-person multidisciplinary UX team, managing 3 designers and partnering with 40+ cross-functional collaborators.
  • Joined as the first designer on Assistant DevX and grew the team to four FTEs.
  • Led the end-to-end design of the Actions Console, launched and presented at Google I/O 2018.
  • Founding designer of the Conversational Actions Platform — took it from a paper concept to a top-level Assistant OKR spanning 40+ people and 2+ years.
View case study→
  • Designed visual exploration, predictive analytics, NLQ, and data-wrangling tools end to end.
  • Partnered with UX researchers to validate prototypes and shipped products with real users.
  • Worked with product owners and executives to shape short- and long-term roadmap and strategy.
View case study→
  • Led end-to-end design to launch the first LimeBike app on iOS and Android.
  • Partnered with marketing and operations to establish and manage LimeBike's brand identity and visual assets.
  • Raised $400K in seed funding; grew the community to 5,000+ creators and 30+ brand partners.
  • Led end-to-end product design — user research, design sprints, CUJs, wireframes, hi-fi mocks, and copy.
  • Hands-on front-end build with HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, and AngularJS.
  • Co-built the full stack on AWS — EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, S3, DynamoDB, RDS, and Elastic Transcoder.
  • Led design across web, iPhone, and Android — dashboards, offer management, analytics, customer engagement, and payments.
  • Designed the merchant welcome site to onboard small businesses.
  • Built Visual Insights — a tool to access, interact with, and author data visualizations on iPad and iPhone.
  • Led the iOS 7 redesign that modernized the entire mobile app.
View case study→

Education & Research

  • Virginia Tech

    2004 — 2010

    PhD & MS, Computer Science

    Human–Computer Interaction, Virtual & Augmented Reality. Dissertation on freehand gesture interfaces. 13 peer-reviewed publications.

  • Zhejiang University

    2000 — 2004

    BS, Computer Science

    Best Undergraduate Research Thesis Award for computer-vision-based hand recognition.

03 — Bookshelf

What I read shapes what I make. A running log.

32 finished · 11 queued

  • On Writing Well
  • Grit
  • Chaos Monkeys
  • Disrupted
  • Creativity, Inc.
  • Mindwise
  • The Power of Habit
  • Linchpin
  • So Good They Can't Ignore You
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow
  • Never Split the Difference
  • Stumbling on Happiness
  • Zero to One
  • Ego Is the Enemy
  • The Tipping Point
  • Influence
  • #AskGaryVee
  • Insanely Simple
  • The Three-Body Problem
  • The Dark Forest
  • The Hunger Games
  • The Martian
  • Steve Jobs
  • A Brief History of Time
  • Awaken the Giant Within
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things
  • The Intelligent Investor
  • Sketching User Experiences
  • The Design of Everyday Things
  • About Face 3
  • The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
  • The 4-Hour Workweek
  • Only the Paranoid Survive
  • Thinking with Type
  • What Do You Care What Other People Think?
  • The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
  • Motivation and Personality
  • Leading
  • Amusing Ourselves to Death
  • Walt Disney
  • Einstein
  • Antifragile
  • The Origin of Species

04 — Contact

Let's build something useful.

Always happy to talk product, design leadership, or a new bet worth taking from zero to one.

tao@taoni.me→LinkedIn