Chris Kirkman
Product & UX Design Leader — Orange County & San Diego · 20+ yrs Open to lead roles

Design leadership with both hands still on the craft.

Twenty years building and leading product design teams across fintech, healthcare, AI, govtech and legal — and I still shipdesignbuildlead it myself. A leader who runs the team and does the work.

VP · Director · Head of Design · Founder President — SDXD + OCXD Eagle Scout
Chris Kirkman at his studio
Open to lead roles
20+
years designing & leading
12+
industries shipped in
2
UX communities led
SDOC
San Diego to Orange County
Brands I’ve
shipped for
Honda Kia Activision loanDepot LG 3M Black & Decker CareFusion Kaiser Teradata Wolters Kluwer
Featured work

Products I've shipped.

View all work
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Chris Kirkman
About

I lead teams — and I’m still the one in the file.

For two decades I’ve connected user needs with business goals — from Figma flows and design systems to stakeholder alignment and team building. I’ve stood up design orgs, shipped consumer and enterprise products, and stayed close enough to the craft to push the pixels when it counts.

Before design, I was a pro skateboard stuntman — Warner Bros’ Grind, a Honda commercial, and more. An Eagle Scout who builds teams the same way: lead from the front, leave it better than you found it.

Eagle Scout
Leadership, earned young
Author & speaker
Design Leadership Forum
Front-end fluent
HTML · CSS · prototyping
Process

My design & strategy process

Four phases that turn business goals and user needs into products people actually want to use — the same approach I’ve run for two decades.

01
Research, Requirements & IA

Gathering requirements, performing research, and laying a solid information architecture before any visual work begins.

02
UX, UI & Wireframing

Wireframing lays out the interface from the research and IA, with the strongest user-experience strategy in mind.

03
Visual Design

Building on the wireframes, visual design layers on the look and feel — appealing UX that makes a product desirable to use.

04
Prototyping & Front-end Dev

With web standards in mind, the design comes to life in responsive HTML5 & CSS3 — usable on any device with a browser.

Leadership

Titles I’ve carried — and the work behind each one.

I’ve held the seat at the top of design and never left the craft behind. The point of a team isn’t to stop doing the work — it’s to multiply it.

VP, Product & UX Design
Big Purple Dot · fintech
Director, UX Design
Veritone · AI · gov · legal
Head, Product Design
Green Street · loanDepot
Principal UX Architect
Saritasa · agency
Creative Director
brand · product · video
Founder
Kirkman & Company LLC
AI & Technology

Leading design in the age of AI.

AI didn't replace the craft — it raised the ceiling on it. I treat it as a force multiplier for my teams: faster research synthesis, broader exploration, sharper decisions. I lead the strategy and stay hands-on in the tools, so the bar keeps moving while the work ships faster.

01
AI-Augmented Design

Generative UI, AI co-creation, and prompt engineering woven into ideation and prototyping — exploring ten directions in the time one used to take.

02
Predictive & Adaptive UX

Interfaces that anticipate intent and adapt in real time — using behavioural signals to cut friction before users ever hit it.

03
Agentic Workflows

Autonomous agents that run multi-step research synthesis, transcription, and insight clustering — turning weeks of analysis into a working afternoon.

04
Responsible & Explainable AI

Trust signals, human-in-the-loop review, and guardrails built in — so teams ship AI features users actually understand and trust.

Fluent across the stack
Generative UI Predictive UX Agentic AI Prompt Engineering Multimodal AI Contextual Grounding (RAG) Explainable AI (XAI) Human-in-the-Loop Model Context Protocol (MCP) Conversational UI Design System Automation Synthetic Data + 88 more in my toolkit
Experience

Two decades, on the leadership track.

2024 — 2025
Head, Product Design
Green Street
Commercial real estate · Newport Beach
2022 — Present
Founder & Lead UX Consultant
Kirkman & Company LLC
Mortgage · Salesforce · Remote
2020 — 2022
Director, UX Design & Product Manager
Veritone
AI · government · legal · Remote
2016 — 2020
VP, Product & UX Design
Big Purple Dot
Mortgage · fintech · Irvine
2015 — 2016
Head, UX Design
loanDepot
Finance · mortgage · Lake Forest
2015
Principal UX Architect · Manager, UX
Saritasa · Corsearch (Wolters Kluwer) · Alcatel OneTouch
Agency · legal · telecom
2009 — 2015
Senior UX / UI & Graphic Design
CareFusion · Raytheon|Websense · Voxox · Aspen Marketing · Miva Merchant
Healthcare · security · telecom
Education — Coleman University · BS, Computer Graphic Design
Community

I lead the design communities I came up in.

President of two of Southern California’s experience-design organizations — building the rooms where designers in San Diego and Orange County grow.

SDXD President
San Diego Experience Design

Talks, mentorship, and meetups that connect the region’s UX, product, and visual designers. 2012 — present.

OCXD President
Orange County Experience Design

Bringing the same community to my home base in OC — events, portfolio reviews, and a network of design leaders.

Selected work

A few deep case studies.

Quality over quantity — the full story behind a few, not a wall of thumbnails.
Featured case study
iOS Android CRM · fintech

Mobile CRM for loan officers

VP, Product & UX Design · Big Purple Dot
Challenge

Loan officers were losing leads between desktop and the field — no fast way to dial, log, and nurture borrowers on the move.

Approach

I led research, IA, and UI for native iOS & Android apps — a built-in dialer, lead pipeline, and automated follow-ups — and built the design system the team shipped on.

Impact

Faster lead response and adoption across the sales org — the apps became the daily driver for loan officers in the field.

2
native apps shipped
1
design system, end to end
4yr
leading the product
Read the full case study 
Design systemWeb · Mobile

Commercial Real Estate Apps

A unifying design system across every Green Street web & mobile product.

→ One language across the whole suite
Data vizWeb app

CRE Analytics Dashboards

Dense market data turned into clear, decision-ready dashboards.

→ Insight at a glance
AndroidMobile

CRM — Android Companion

The same lead-management power, native to Android.

→ Parity across platforms
EnterpriseData

Supply Chain Platform

Complex enterprise workflows made legible and genuinely usable.

→ Dense data, made calm
UXUIWeb

Travel Booking UX / UI

End-to-end booking experience, from search to checkout.

→ Fewer steps to book
DialerLead flow

In-App Dialer & Lead Flow

One-tap calling and follow-ups built right into the pipeline.

→ Call, log, nurture — in one place

“Chris is an amazing designer and gifted author. His designs are clean, creative, well thought through, and concentrate on the message and call to action. I strongly recommend Chris to anyone looking for a superb designer and CSS guru.”

Sabine Sharp — President, Glendale Designs