Anatole Ayadi
Staff / Principal Product Designer
anatoleayadi@gmail.com·aaoa.design·linkedin.com/in/anatoleayadi
English, fluent · Français, native · 日本語, conversational with JLPT study ongoing
Returning to Tokyo, Q4 2026. Previously resident in Japan. Seeking Staff or Principal Product Designer roles at English-first companies. Visa sponsorship required.
20 years of product design, from mechanical engineering, through agencies and startups to their acquisitions and now my own studio. Hands-on into the codebase: I take products from 0→1, rebuild them when the market says so, ship and maintain design systems as production packages, and make the calls about what not to build. Each project below is written up in full at aaoa.design.
Experience
Braineet
2017 – 2023 · 6 yrs
Lead Product Designer · B2B innovation SaaS, Paris · Acquired
- Led product design across three product generations and two full pivots, from a narrow-market ideation platform to Project Portfolio Management: the generation that found product-market fit and carried the company to acquisition.
- Built and maintained three design systems, one per generation, unifying client-facing challenge management, backend administration and company dashboards.
- Interviews with project managers, plus a competitive review of Asana, Trello and ClickUp, surfaced the gap that became the rebuild: plenty of tools to collect ideas, none that carried them through to which projects actually get funded.
- Designed the PPM rebuild: portfolio-first navigation with drill-down, a steps-and-gates Gantt view, and a custom-field data model users could toggle, reorder, filter, group and sort. Added a Smart PowerPoint exporter binding live portfolio data to slide placeholders, removing the manual reporting cycle that blocked executive adoption.
- Killed a feature that tested well and failed in practice. Guided brainstorming drove enthusiastic idea generation, then stalled, proving the bottleneck was downstream execution rather than ideation. That finding redirected the company.
AAOA.studio
2023 – Present
Product Lead · Design studio, remote
- Lead design across a lean team shipping to the App Store and the web: research, product decisions, interface, design systems and front-end implementation.
- Kann 間 (iOS, SwiftUI). 4,000 downloads, 2.2 sessions/day, sustained daily-habit retention. 7,620+ curated vocabulary entries across 22 domains, on a modified SM-2+ spaced-repetition engine tracking four question types with response-time weighting. 730 commits over 21 months.
- MooooM (Figma, npm). Design system shipped as 5 npm packages: 6,319 icons across four weights, 860+ tokens generated from 28 colour scales in sRGB and P3, 38+ WCAG 2.1 AA components with full ARIA and keyboard navigation. Token and icon pipelines are generated, not hand-maintained.
- Prefume (iOS, SwiftUI, GRDB). 1,000+ users. Rebuilt the recommendation engine from 9 scoring dimensions and 1,159 lines to 3 honest inputs in 310 lines once the original proved to need data new users do not have.
- Bhann (Next.js, Convex). Designed a 21-tier decremental pricing model where price falls as the user base grows, making extractive pricing structurally impossible. Live public transparency page for revenue, costs and sustainability.
Design Professor · Live teaching
- Teach product and interface design live to a recurring audience: critique, design systems, and design-to-code workflow. Long-running practice in making design reasoning legible to non-designers.
NoMercy.tv
2022 – Present
Product Design · Long-term design advisory
- Ongoing advisory for a self-hosted media server competing with Plex on library ownership, delivering a mainstream streaming experience over user-owned infrastructure.
Embedded Design Consultant · Design consultancy, Paris
- Embedded on the pitch-and-prove engagement that won BNP Paribas, one of France's largest banks, as a client.
- Ran all research on site at the bank: bilingual French and English discovery workshops with employees and managers, persona and context mapping, and day-in-the-life journey mapping across six stages including night-shift patterns and crisis peaks. Prioritised with dot-voting, then handed the programme over running at full speed.
Product Designer · Digital agency, Paris · Acquired by Onepoint
- Ran up to seven client projects in parallel in a given week, for clients including Dior, L'Oréal, SNCF and Axa Assistance.
- Shipped across an unusually wide surface: a travel-risk companion for Axa Assistance, QuickSign KYC document capture, the Brok&Trok second-hand marketplace, Dior TV, L'Oréal Citizen Day, an SNCF quiz and survey platform, and VR prototypes tested on Oculus.
- Led UI and UX research with prototypes in Scrum teams, running 15+ user testing sessions and client workshops. The pace taught prioritisation and judgement about when work is ready to ship.
How I Work
Design → Code
I ship what I design in SwiftUI, React, Next.js, TypeScript, CSS. Prototypes are built, not mocked, so validation happens against the real thing.
Systems
Design systems built and maintained across four companies. Tokens and icons generated from source, never hand-maintained.
Deciding what not to build
Every case study on the site names a feature deliberately cut, and the reasoning. Scope integrity is the part of the job that compounds.
Research
100+ end users interviewed directly. In-person discovery workshops, journey mapping, usability sessions, competitive analysis, 1,000+ beta testers on Kann alone.
Skills
Design
Product design, design systems, interaction design, UX research, usability testing, brand identity, information architecture, accessibility and inclusive design (WCAG 2.1 AA), prototyping
AI
Integral to how I ship code, Claude Code and Cursor for implementation, local models via LM Studio for private work, AI-assisted research synthesis and content curation.
Engineering
SwiftUI, SwiftData, React, Next.js, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, Convex, GRDB, Git
Tools
Figma, Framer, Xcode, Cursor, Claude Code, LM Studio, GitHub, Notion, Sketch Book and Pencil
Education
MSc, Digital Media & Web Development · EPSAA, Paris · 2014–2015
BTS, Graphic Design & Print Communication · École Supérieure Estienne, Paris · 2013–2014
BTEC HND, Industrial Drawing & Mechanical Engineering · Lycée Jules Algoud, Valence · 2009–2013
Certifications: JavaScript Intermediate (SoloLearn, 2024) · Introduction to Machine Learning (Google, 2023) · Foundations of UX Design (Google, 2021) · Foundations of Project Management (Google, 2021)
Earlier
iPStand, Paris · Product Designer · 2014–2015. iPad and iPhone interfaces, wireframes, prototypes and motion design.
CNC Operator · 2010–2013. Mechanical engineering and industrial drawing, where a tenth of a millimetre is a defect.
MacJava · Graphic Designer and Educator · 2006–2011. Design and technical communication for a Mac OS enthusiast community. Where the teaching started.
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