Melanie Gower
AI-native product designer and workflow transformation leader. Turning complex, high-stakes work into trusted product systems — then building the tools, routines, and playbooks that help teams work differently for good.
Summary
Product design leader with 13+ years across enterprise B2B SaaS, climate-tech, AI governance, design systems, research practice, and AI-native workflow transformation.
I build products and the operating systems around them: the practices, skills, audits, evals, and source-of-truth loops that let teams move faster without losing judgment, craft, or trust.
Most recently VP of Product Design at Optera, where I led design across a climate-tech platform serving Fortune 500 sustainability teams including Tesla, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Toast, TJX, and Lime.
Current tinkerings
- Jan 2026 — Present
FieldRules.ai
Co-founder
Building the elicitation layer between a team's expertise and its AI agents: turning domain judgment into governable, queryable rules agents can actually use.
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- Co-designed and shipped the product from zero: provenance-first data model, BECAUSE-grounded elicitation UX, confirmable rule library, and review surfaces.
- Sought to make human judgment architecturally irreplaceable by designing the BECAUSE field as structurally non-AI-generatable rather than merely policy-protected.
- Built eval-driven design practice with named quality metrics: tautology rate, boilerplate score, confirmation rate, and quality composite.
- Encoded the operating model into a living Claude skill system with 30+ versioned skills that update Notion, rerank Jira, audit drift, and stitch prototypes on a schedule.
- Built a self-improving seed-library-generator skill that reduced prospect domain seeding from roughly 2 hours to 18 seconds.
- Feb 2026 — Present
Helm
AI Designer / Product Manager · Fractional
Embedded as the first designer and first PM for a 0-to-1 AI-native OKR product, owning persona research, product strategy, systems design, AI surface design, and engineering handoff.
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- Authored a six-skill Claude suite for customer-loop synthesis, surface auditing, design-system updates, and prototype-to-ticket workflows.
- Built the diagnostic spine in Figma and Markdown: persona storyboards, current-state audits, and an 80+ story user-story map.
- Designed AI surfaces for proactive coaching, on-demand analysis, Slack-first push UX, AI-prepared reviews, retrospectives, and per-objective prediction layers.
- Shipped Helm Design System v5.2, interactive CEO prototype, ideal-state flows, Slack interaction designs, onboarding flows, gap analysis, and 12-week execution plan.
- Apr 2026
AI-native product explorations
Independent builder
Independent builds exploring how systems transform public data, context, and human behavior into coordinated action.
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- GridPath: real-time grid coordination prototype using EIA, NOAA/NWS, EPA EJScreen, Census ACS, WattTime, LBNL, and anomaly detection patterns.
- Quiet Hours: localized energy-shifting guidance using public grid, weather, rate, emissions, and household-load datasets.
- Between Nowhere: mobile-first human-legible build using the public NCVEC Amateur Radio Technician Question Pool and a custom teaching layer.
- Built and shipped through AI-native workflows across ChatGPT, Figma Make, Codex, Claude Code, and Lovable.
Experience
- 2021 — 2026
Optera
VP / Director of Product Design
Led product design across Optera's multi-product climate-tech platform serving Tesla, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Toast, TJX, Lime, and other Fortune 500 sustainability teams. Scaled the company's first design organization.
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- Promoted to VP to lead product design across data-dense enterprise carbon-accounting workflows.
- Led design across Investments, Outreach, Operator, Supply Chain Manager, and the Emissions Response Library + browser plugin.
- Translated spreadsheet- and consultant-led workflows into trusted product systems using user research, journey maps, object-oriented UX, taxonomy design, and reusable master objects.
- Reduced manual data-entry effort by roughly 40-60% through workflow redesign and AI automation patterns.
- Originated and drove automated data ingest using OCR, anomaly surfacing, confidence scoring, and human-in-the-loop review states.
- Originated and drove supplier response management, including browser plugin and dashboard workflows for reusable governed emissions answers.
- Appointed by CEO to lead org-wide AI adoption, defining guardrails, prototypes, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
- Built scalable design infrastructure: design-system foundations, charting libraries, UI standards, and handoff practices.
- Embedded customer research into delivery, including journey reviews and a pre-code usability quality bar before engineering handoff.
- Launched a centralized feedback intake and triage system in two weeks with Coda, Zapier, and Slack; reached company-wide adoption within one month.
- 2020 — 2021
Altvia
Head of Design
Led UX design for private-capital products serving General Partners and Limited Partners across desktop and mobile.
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- Designed GP deal-flow and portfolio-management workflows, including pipeline tracking, diligence, investment reporting, and collaboration surfaces.
- Led LP-facing mobile experiences focused on capital commitments, portfolio visibility, reporting, and investor trust.
- Worked across fundraising, deal execution, portfolio monitoring, and investor communication.
- Built shared component libraries and delivery standards to support product consistency and long-term scalability.
- Hired, trained, and managed designers while staying close to hands-on product execution.
- 2015 — 2020
Chatlingual
Design Lead
Designed a multilingual customer-support platform from the ground up in close partnership with leadership and engineering.
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- Owned research, workflow design, UI patterns, and interface execution across agent and customer experiences.
- Enabled live cross-language communication between businesses and customers across 90+ languages.
- Built and maintained a component library and style guidelines to scale consistency.
- 2014 — 2015
Gloo
Mobile Design Lead
Designed mobile-first workflows and UI patterns for a large-scale CMS and content marketplace.
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- Partnered with design and engineering leadership to create cohesive interface systems and reusable patterns.
- 2012 — 2013
FleetCreature
Creative Director
Designed web and mobile apps, marketing pages, and brand assets for clients across multiple industries.
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- Led client workshops to define brand and product direction.
- Mentored and trained new designers.
Education
Emory University
B.A., English Literature · 2008
Skills
- AI-native workflow transformation
- Design systems
- Data-dense B2B UX
- Enterprise workflow design
- Technical product leadership
- Rapid prototyping
- User research
- Usability testing
- AI adoption and trust patterns
- Eval-driven product enhancement
- User observability
- Org scaling
- Design leadership
- Mentoring
- Strategic storytelling
- Cross-functional alignment
Tools
- Figma
- Figma Make
- Figma MCP
- Storybook
- Lovable
- Claude
- Claude Code
- Claude Code skills
- Claude Code plugins
- Claude Cowork
- Codex
- ChatGPT
- GitHub
- GitHub PR/review workflows
- Linear
- Notion
- Obsidian
- Coda
- Zapier
- Maze
- Vercel
- Supabase
Recommendation excerpts
“product designer and a product thinker in the same person”
“champion for introducing AI into our workflow, across multiple teams”
“one of the most exceptional design leaders I’ve ever collaborated with”