About · Mohsin Amjed
I have never fit cleanly into one lane.
I started as a designer who could code. Teams started calling me in when a problem needed product judgment. Now I lead the function and build the conditions that let a team do its best work. Twelve plus years across Microsoft, Samsung, Salesforce, Sitetracker, and Axios HQ. Today I am running Nibbble.io, Kintsu Medspa, and Simple Cortex in parallel, so the player-coach claim has commit history behind it.
Identity
The throughline is unglamorous. I sit between design, product, and business decisions, and I am most useful when the brief is half-written and the path forward still has to be argued for. Teams call me in when the product has outgrown its shape, the function needs structure, or the next bet has more risk than answers.
I do not believe craft and strategy are different jobs. They are the same job, sequenced.
Career arc
Twelve plus years, six companies, one pattern.
Microsoft (2012 to 2013). App Experience team. Cut global partner onboarding by over 60%. Learned how design lives inside a platform.
Samsung Electronics (2013 to 2015). Co-founded Samsung Ads as the founding design lead. The business unit cleared $20M in profit in its first year.
SalesforceIQ (2015 to 2017). Principal designer on Contact Gallery. The redesign lifted daily active users by 40% and duplicates merged by 34%.
Salesforce (2017 to 2020). Senior product designer on Salesforce Essentials. Shaped SMB packaging and onboarding inside the bigger org.
Convoy (2020). Principal designer on the SMB booking journey. Cut steps by 35% and lifted conversions by 18%. Piloted dual-track agile that raised design-to-development throughput by a quarter.
Sitetracker (2021 to 2023). Director of Product Design and Head of Design. Built the function from zero: hiring, ladders, critique culture, the operating model the team kept running after I left.
Axios HQ (2023 to 2025). Sr. Director of Product and Design. Re-architected the platform in three months and helped double AI usage across the product.
The shape of the work is consistent. The brief is unfinished. The structure under the work has to be built before any screen earns its place. I move between vision and execution without losing either, because the best people I have worked for did the same.
What I'm building now
Three ventures in parallel, all making the same point: a senior design leader can hold craft, design operations, and AI fluency in the same pair of hands without losing any of the three.
- Nibbble.io. Multi-tenant restaurant loyalty SaaS. Live in production at app.nibbble.io since April 2026. Three role-specific portals (admin, staff, customer), Square POS ingestion, Stripe billing, and a customer council of four restaurants pressure-testing the work. The headline design call was the component library: HeroUI v3, because it ships agent-native artifacts (agents.md, llms.txt, MCP server, agent skills). When most of the code is written by AI, the library choice is the design system decision.
- Simple Cortex. AI consulting practice for Northern Virginia businesses and government. Landing live at simplecortex.com. Built as a three-agent operating company committed to git. Each agent is a four-file contract (AGENTS.md, SOUL.md, HEARTBEAT.md, TOOLS.md) so persona, instructions, execution, and tool surface stay independently reviewable.
- Kintsu Medspa. Brand, voice, and website for a physician-led boutique medspa serving skin of color. I authored the brand and visual direction in person with the client, then encoded the five voice pillars into the repo as
AI_DESIGN_GUIDELINES.md. The bar I set in the room is the bar an AI hits at PR time. 209 of 214 commits on the site authored personally.
The sequence is the point. The brand and the design get built by hand. The systems that scale and codify the work get built with AI. The handoff is in the repo, not in a deck.
How I lead
The leadership style is practical, not stylized. I create clarity, protect the team, and raise the bar through critique, coaching, and decisions written down. I hire ahead of need, build the function around the people, use Jobs to Be Done as the shared decision language, apply design ops to AI contribution, and stay player-coach by default so I still ship. Culture is not separate from execution. Culture is how execution happens.
How I build a design function →
AI fluency
The proof is the current work, not the next essay. Three production repos carry AI contracts. A model-routing operator surface (ocr) makes cost a thing the team can see. A brand voice runs as a lint rule. A customer council pressure-tests decisions before they ship. Local-first models with cloud fallback per route. Judge-and-proposer patterns where Sonnet judges what M4 Ollama proposes. Kill criteria with public postmortems when a bet fails the gate.
I am less interested in AI as theater and more interested in AI as product infrastructure. The visible features matter. The work that quietly removes friction matters more.
Personal context
I am a faith-rooted operator. The same patience that lives in a critique room shows up in the community work.
I serve as VP of Design and Innovation for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association (AMYA), the youth arm of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in the United States. Across the years, our chapters have raised and donated over $100,000 toward hunger relief and helped feed over 700,000 hungry Americans through coordinated food drives and community kitchens. That work shapes how I lead the day work too. Long horizons, small teams, real people downstream.
Currently open to
Director of Product Design, Sr. Director, VP, and Head of Design roles at small to mid product-led companies where a player-coach still matters. Advising and fractional work too, when the brief is specific and the stakes are real.
If that sounds like the shape of your problem, get in touch.