ryan coughlin / Mainer, designer & fly fishing junkie
What makes a great digital product?
I’ve been working at that for the last 10 years. And I've found that all great products have one thing in common:
They were created by a talented and cohesive team. The problem the product solved was clearly known by each team member.
Each step was thoughtfully crafted from: defining the problem, developing user journeys, validating the product, and creating an initial plan to wireframe, design, and bring that product to market.
Hi, my name is Ryan Coughlin, and I’m a designer at robin. I figure out creative ways to make practical and innovative products.
If you’d like to see examples of my previous work, check out my portfolio on Dribbble.
Prior to Robin...
...my time was spent consulting at thoughtbot and MojoTech. At these companies, I consulted for early stage startups, product companies, and large corporations. My roles included:
- Product ideation and validation
- Design sprint facilitation
- Front-end design implementation
- Collaborating with product managers
As much as I enjoyed this work, I did not have the opportunity to practice my craft on a single platform. To fill that void, I made the jump to work full time at a product company.
Currently, I am building meeting room booking software.
My day-to-day consists of:
- Closely working with the design team to inspire new ideas and bring them to market
- Ensuring visual and product design consistency across each product within the platform
- Creating communication channels with product team to ensure designs are hitting quarterly goals
- Building design systems to decrease designer / developer hand-off
- Facilitating design sprints with designers, developers and product managers — Build the right thing, at the right time
- Mentoring the design team to convey design goals, address product team feedback, prioritize tasks, and other design related processes
What's next &
roles that excite me
- High impact, high value projects
- Leading new product initiatives
- Collaborating with design savvy front-end engineers
- Building products that talk to hardware
- Redefining visual directions across products and platforms
- Mentoring design team members
Sound interesting?
Get in TouchWork Side projects in the wild
As much as I love design, I was getting tired of only being able to make something in Sketch. Four years ago, I began to learn Objective C, which transitioned into Swift.
Over the past the year, I have been working with React Native to build a few of the projects you can check out below.
A few of them can be seen below:
Tropos
How does it feel outside relative to yesterday?
GradientDaze
Gesture based gradients never felt so good
Salty
What is the current tide?
Boston born, Maine raised
I grew up in a small coastal town in Maine. I've always loved the outdoors and being on the water. Hiking, fly fishing—you name it, I do it.
In my free time, I enjoy shooting photos, tying flies, and exploring new water.