AI Interaction Design

Rod Howard.

rod@rod.me · (702) 578-1311 · rodhoward.design · linkedin.com/in/rodhoward · Ann Arbor, MI

Summary

Lead Product Designer with 12 years in enterprise B2B SaaS, specializing in AI interaction design. I design the layer between AI systems and the people who rely on them: how much the system does on its own, when it asks first, and how it shows its work. Currently designing the agentic content generation system behind Yext's intent pages. I prototype in code and build multi-agent tooling to stress-test interaction models before build.

Experience
Yext (acquired Hearsay Systems) Lead Product Designer Feb 2023–Present · Remote
  • Designed the agentic system behind Yext intent pages, combining brand-compliant AI generation with human approval to power hyper-local SEO/AEO for national brands across thousands of locations.
  • Led design and research on an at-risk $3M expansion. Cleared six design blockers across desktop, mobile, and embedded Salesforce within a fixed release window to get the contract signed.
  • Overhauled design operations across 3 scrum teams, reducing late-sprint rework: requirement clarity rose from 55% to 78% and handoff satisfaction from 48% to 70%.
  • Designed and prototyped new AI interaction models for Relate, replacing standard chat sidebars with in-workflow agents and graduated autonomy controls; validated through concept testing with financial advisors.
  • Standardized design team QA by pairing a reusable-template content strategy with a custom LLM evaluation tool that audits designs against those guidelines, cutting turnaround per template from about a week of back-and-forth to 1-2 days.
Hearsay Systems Senior Product Designer Jun 2019–Feb 2023 · Remote
  • Led design and strategy from 0 to 1 for Actions, Hearsay's automated outreach product, lifting advisor conversations with incoming leads by 40%.
  • Mapped end-to-end compliance workflows to identify key time sinks, designing a streamlined review process that cut weekly team effort by 80%, reclaiming ~25 hours per week.
  • Cut publishing compliance support tickets 53% by analyzing top drivers and redesigning channel targeting rules, lexicon warnings, and disabled network states into contextual UI.
Singlecomm Senior Product Designer Aug 2014–Jun 2019 · Remote
  • Designed a no-code call-center scripting platform 0 to 1, cutting script deployment from 8 weeks to 3 days. Beachbody alone saved over $100K a year.
  • Coded HTML/CSS/JS prototypes of the platform's riskiest interactions (drag-and-drop logic, conditional branching, live preview) and validated them with enterprise scriptwriters before the build.
  • Delivered the platform's front-end UI as production-grade code, enabling developers to plug in backend logic directly.
Skills
AI & Agentic Design
AI interaction patterns, graduated autonomy & human-in-the-loop systems, agentic workflow design, LLM prototyping, evaluation design, prompt architecture, local model deployment (Apple Silicon / MLX)
Product Design
End-to-end product design, interaction design, information architecture, design systems, user research & usability testing, rapid prototyping (incl. HTML/CSS/JS)
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Claude Code & coding agents, Git/GitHub, Jira, UserTesting, FullStory
Independent AI Practice
Community
Education