Consumer product · 0→1
Found
Reimagined dating profiles around thoughtful prompts and richer user data to encourage deeper connections. Led product strategy, creative direction, brand, IA, flows, and end-to-end UX.
Silvia Stephenson · Director of Product + Design
All. The. Things.
I help early-stage startups, established businesses, and entrepreneurs build, scale, and streamline through strong product vision, design excellence, and smart systems thinking.
Product and design leader with 15+ years spanning high-scale community platforms, B2B SaaS, and 0→1 AI. I work where strategy, systems, and delivery meet.
Selected work
A few things I've built.
Platforms, pivots, and 0→1 products — each one a story about strategy, systems, and the decisions that got a team to a shipped, measurable outcome.
- 01
Towne.io · Product Strategy + SaaS Platform Leadership · 2023 – Present
Towne
Head of Product + Design (client engagement)
Pivoted a consumer marketplace into a B2B retail SaaS platform, and rebuilt the product strategy around what retailers actually pay for. Launched brand, marketing site and MVP experience, with a phased AI roadmap and pricing model built for expansion revenue.
- 02
Burning Man Project · Product + Design Leadership · 2011 – 2020
Burning Man Project
Development Leader + Sr. Product Design/Management
Ten years, 20+ platforms, and the systems behind moving tens of millions of dollars in minutes. $2.8M refunded in 4 weeks, $1.6M crowdfunded in 6 weeks, ticketing scaled from 1 sale to 7 annual sales supporting $30M+ in transactions.
- 03
MediaViz AI · 0→1 AI Product Strategy · 2020 – 2023
MediaViz AI
Head of Product + Design
Turning an AI model that could judge composition, mood, and aesthetics into a product someone would actually use. Shipped an interactive demo product that established product direction and supported enterprise and investor conversations.
- 04
Move Inc. / Realtor.com · Experimentation at Scale · 2010 – 2011
Move.com
Senior Product Designer
A structured A/B and multivariate testing program on high-traffic real estate products, conversion improvements up to 200%. Conversion rate improvements of up to 200% through a structured experimentation program.
- 05
PropertyBot.io · Product Judgment · 2023 – 2024
PropertyBot
Product Leader + Co-founder
Validated an opportunity rigorously, built enough to test it, and chose not to keep spending. Hypothesis tested at low cost. Investment stopped before it became sunk.
About
Turning ambiguity into clear direction and executable strategy.
I love design. All aspects of it, from architecture to interfaces, hardware to software, civic art to that button on the elevator.
Everything we see and interact with evokes an emotion. I love the emotions, and the why and the how of All. The. Things.
I'm a proven Product and Design leader with deep experience across UX, Design Operations, Marketing Communication, and Product and Engineering Management. I've led teams in both for-profit and complex nonprofit organizations serving large communities, and I'm a passionate manager and mentor.
AI is a key part of my work, from uncovering opportunities to improve workflows to implementing practical solutions across product, marketing, design, and operations. I help teams automate where it counts, speed up execution, and make better decisions through intelligent systems.
My strengths run across business strategy, team building, usability, mobile and web applications, product design and development, and system integrations. I specialize in 0→1 product development, design systems, and org design.
Product & design
- Product Design
- UX · IxD · UI
- Information Architecture
- Design Systems
- Mobile & Web Apps
- Creative Direction
Leadership
- Product Management
- Design Ops
- Team Management
- Org Design
- Mentoring
- Contact
- stephenson.silvia@gmail.com
HOW I OPERATE
Value. Empathy. Play.
01 / VALUE
Systems before features.
Great teams do their best work when people understand what matters, why it matters, and how decisions get made. I create operating systems around intake, prioritization, ownership, and delivery so teams can focus on the work instead of navigating ambiguity.
02 / EMPATHY
Evidence over volume.
Empathy means understanding users, teammates, stakeholders, and constraints. Research, experimentation, and explicit decision criteria help separate signal from noise — and sometimes lead to the decision not to build at all.
03 / PLAY
Create room to explore.
Play fuels curiosity, experimentation, and resilience, but it still needs structure. The goal is a strategy teams can actually act on: clear requirements, prototypes, named owners, and enough room to test better ideas.
“If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous, and helpful”.
Alan Cooper
Additional work
A few other products, experiments, and launches.
Consumer product · Positioning
BeMoSo
Defined and designed a geolocation-based social product for the 'not necessarily single but social' market seeking shared activities without the pressure of dating. Led positioning, brand, product strategy, UX/UI, prototyping market differentiation.
eCommerce · Brand · GTM
Coffee Life Exotics
Helped and mentored two teen founders launch an eCommerce coffee brand spanning business strategy, positioning, identity, Shopify, packaging, PR, and go-to-market.