Kris Davis
Product and Design Leadership
Product and design leader who builds AI-native teams.
20 years in design, including leading combined product management and design teams in enterprise security and AI. I turn traditional teams into AI-native ones and tie the change to revenue, speed, and customer outcomes.
Case Studies
From First Design Hire to Leading Product and Design Through a Turnaround
Deepwatch
Joined as the first design hire, redirected the company's investment to the Security Center, then took over product management and design. Moved the team to dual-track agile, cut release cycles from quarterly to 2 to 4 weeks, and migrated 200+ enterprise customers with zero churn.
Making a Company AI-Native, and $6M in Sales
Snowfire.ai
As employee #2 and a named inventor on the patent-pending method, I helped build a repeatable decision-intelligence platform and moved the leadership team onto AI workflows I built. Vision to 1,000+ demos to 250 trials to $6M in sales, with $60M in pipeline.
Turning a Creative Team Into a Product Design Practice
Miles Partnership
As the team's first official design manager, I moved 4 creative designers into strategic product and service design, built the company's first designer career paths, and launched a new service design line.
Experience
Product and design leader who builds AI-native teams. I lead product managers and designers, move teams to dual-track agile, and rebuild how the work gets done with AI, from prototyping and shipping to sales and operations. I tie every change to revenue, speed, and customer outcomes, and I build with AI coding agents myself.
Snowfire.ai
Head of Product Experience & Growth
Employee #2 and named inventor on the company's patent-pending method for adaptive decision intelligence, brought in by the CEO to turn a raw idea into a business. Made the defining strategic call, to build a scalable product platform rather than sell bespoke engagements, and built the metric ontology and context engine that let the AI reason about a company's data the way its own leaders do. Owned the product and the growth engine end to end: partnered with engineering on context management and production reliability, replatformed the application front end onto React using AI coding agents, and conceived and built an autonomous agentic marketing pipeline. Drove the funnel from vision to 1,000+ demos, 250 enterprise trials, $6M in closed sales, and $60M in active pipeline. Led the company's move to AI-native work: an AI-built marketing site (new pages in days, not weeks), an AI-built app repo (features in days, not months), agents that turn tickets into pull requests, and a quoting app synced with HubSpot that cut quotes from 4 hours to 30 minutes. Part-time until the company reached its first revenue milestone (early 2025), then full-time.
Independent AI Product Advisor
Self-employed
Small-scale 1:1 advising for founders and leaders on AI products and AI-native ways of working. Advised the founder of an AI talent development startup from whiteboard to market-ready product: built the design system, prototyped with AI coding tools, and validated concepts with HR leaders. Shaped a 0-to-1 agentic cybersecurity product with its CEO in 3 months: prototyped tool-calling and reasoning-transparency patterns and delivered a validated MVP definition and roadmap.
Miles Partnership
Director of Product Design Strategy
Denver, CO. First official manager of a team of 4 designers, previously reporting to a non-design SVP. Unified the team around a shared vision and moved them from creative UI design to strategic product and service design. Built the company's first structured career paths and competency model for designers. Overhauled client delivery: brought the team into Figma and design systems, and added research, information architecture, and site mapping to scope projects and guide approvals. Launched a new service design line, shipping two engagements with existing clients, and gave design a seat in account planning and scoping. Led the team through launching new sites for tourism boards including Travel South Dakota and San Diego (sandiego.org).
Fixify.ai
Head of Product Design & Brand
Hired by the CEO to help design the product, AI-assisted IT support workflows combining LLM automation with human escalation paths. Defined when and how AI responses are generated, validated, and handed off to human agents. Created interaction patterns for ambiguity, failure states, and low-confidence outputs. Established trust mechanisms including transparency cues and user control over automated actions. Delivered scalable support experiences reducing manual workload while maintaining service quality.
Deepwatch
Director of Product Design & Strategy
Took over product management and design (4 designers, 3 product managers, steering 13 engineers) after product leadership resigned, reporting to the CTO. Moved the team from waterfall to dual-track agile, cutting release cycles from quarterly to every 2 to 4 weeks. Took the Security Center from MVP to beta in 3 months and general availability in 6, migrating 200+ enterprise customers with zero churn. Cut contacts per customer success manager by 15% through self-service, and built the company's first career development framework.
Deepwatch
Sr. Product Design Manager
First design hire after a $53M raise, brought on to lead the flagship mobile application. Built the design function and hired the first designers. Research and analytics on the mobile app showed it and other funded products weren't being adopted, so I convinced executives to sunset that work and refocus on the Security Center, and was promoted to Director during the transition.
Slalom Consulting
User Experience Manager
Managed a team of 4 and led UX across enterprise client engagements, delivering end-to-end product design solutions across industries. Developed strategic client relationships and contributed to business development.
Education
Master's in Product Design Management
Northwestern University
Chicago, IL
Bachelor of Science in Interactive Media Design
Art Institute of California
Los Angeles, CA