Canada

UX Design

Design Operations

Data Analysis

Business Transformation

Graphic Design Diploma

Michael Rurka

Director of Product

Product strategy

Communication

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Time management

Critical-thinking

Empathy

Organisation skills

Stakeholder management

Leadership

Project management

UserTesting

Webflow

Zapier

ChatGPT

Figma

Glide

Intercom

Selenium

Hands-on helping organize, strategize and execute. 

■ Reduced employee theft by 99% after implementing a custom order management system and payroll system within 2 months. Saving the company 10-20% of their bottom line.
■ Achieved 266% YoY gross profit growth
■ Managed design, development, launch and data instrumentation of a 2-sided marketplace social platform.

Changing the world, one individual at a time. Through 1:1 coaching, workshops and a wellness app I'm building.

Oreka App is a Journal/Mood tracking and analysis app aimed at helping people make better decisions.
■ Data is captured on iOS/Android app built with FlutterFlow and Firebase
■ Analysis is done on web/desktop using Python and Plotly for visualization

RenoRun is a on-demand construction material delivery startup (i.e. Uber Eats for Home Depot)

■ Led product strategy for the Supply Squad, tackling Merchandise and Pricing initiatives such as an in-house PIM, pricing and inventory automation, and overall catalogue reliability and up-time.
■ Reduced price update time for benchmarked products by 80%
■ Increased product catalogue update reliability from abysmal to 99%
■ (Previously) Led scrum rituals and managed the backlog of 3 engineer teams simultaneously.

■ Managing a team of designers (3 of us). Hosting watch parties, design critiques, and product demos during company all-hands to foster design culture.
■ Led the design of RenoRun’s Ecom site build from start to launch. Assigning parts of the flow to designers based on experience and interest. I owned checkout and account management.
■ Championed the case and development of our design system. Borrowing from Atomic principles, books, online resources and fellow designers at other companies.
■ Designed the internal console used by CSAs and Sales to place orders, manage customers and orders.
■ Managed ongoing efficiency improvements. One such bundle of improvements saved CSAs and Sales approx. 2.25 - 3.25 h/day (78 - 110 h/week, org wide)

I was fortunate to be the first designer at RenoRun, able to dirty my hands in all areas of the business.

■ Audit the initial app experience and uncovered many UI/UX opportunities based on a mix of my previous experience, best practices and user interviews.
■ Completely redesigned and modernized the customer app.
■ Redesigned the Driver App from the ground up, with heavy influence from ride-sharing apps. This process was informed by "deep hangouts" with drivers, riding-along and helping out with material deliveries. 
■ At the outset of any redesigns, every component was carefully built and organized into a component library / design system in Figma. Passed onto the engineers using Zeplin.

My brother and some friends built an internet of things marketplace and info centre. Revenue by affiliate links to the product's websites. Had a lot of fun and learnt some new skills along the way.

• Designed IoT's visual brand, with the help of Mahdi Al-Farra.
• Designed the UI and overall experience design.
• Helped out with markup (Pug/Jade) and styles (Sass)
• Ran Google and Instagram ads to generate leads
• Managed our Instagram account  and other social platforms.
• Sourcing and managing contractors for data scraping, entry and content writing.

(Now acquired by Thirty Madison) Nurx is a Y-Combinator startup in the sexual health space. Improving access to essential medications like birth control and Truvada for PrEP. Bridging the gaps between information, access to providers and easy home deliveries.

■ Managed 1 designer. Working cross functionally with engineers, operations and medical professionals.
■ Designed the marketing website, and redesigned the entire app experience.
■ Conducted dozens of interviews: Needfinding, usability tests, competitor comparison.
■ Designed the operations console from the ground up. To manage customers; review and approve/deny prescription requests; chat with customers. The modularity of this tool allowed us to scale from 1 state to 14+ states, with many concurrent users such as customer service, operations RNs and MDs.
■ Co-created monthly marketing campaign and graphics. Many of which were featured in major digital media sites across the US.

My passion is exploring the root of problems, and designing solutions that are functional both and aesthetically, and emotionally pleasing. Clients include: Nurx, SimpTek Technologies, Kraken International, CollegeMix, Eigen Innovations.

Motto ——
■ Give a shit, do good work, and be pleasant to work with.

Day to day ——
■ Research, experience and UI design for any device.
■ Scalable modular design based approach in UI elements, HTML markup and Sass conventions.
■ Qualitative and quantitative user testing and interviews. 
■ Prototyping: InVision, Marvel App, Principle App and Proto.io.

Selective Few is an ecommerce platform that brought brick and mortar high fashion and contemporary streetwear to the global market. Every month, we released monthly capsule collections of highly unique, low supply high demand products.

• Developed Selective Few's visual brand with the creative direction of Andrew Pecker.
• Lots and lots of ecommerce usability and conversion.
• Creating visuals for google ads, social media, and weekly capsule collection releases. 
• Leveraged Photoshop workflows to touch up product photos in to achieve a cohesiveness.
• Helped our development team with markup and CSS/Sass

Part of Montreal's Founder Fuel Accelerator Program, Nu Messenger was a hyper encrypted and anonymous (if desired) messenger tailored for event organizers. Creating a group chat for attendees was as simple as typing any URL suffix like "nu-msg.com/new-random-chat". Hitting an existing URL would open up that chat.

• Developed the visual brand.
• Designed the user experience and messenger UI.
• Did all of the HTML markup and Sass (CSS) styling.

I worked with HotSpot Parking on a freelance basis for over a year before joining them full time. This overlapped my time at Ginger Design.

HotSpot Parking is a downtown revitalization startup: Encouraging consumers to shop local by reducing the hassle of downtown parking. Consumers were now able to pay for meter parking with their credit cards, and also receive free parking from local businesses. Through the app, businesses were able to push loyalty incentives and track their effectiveness. Furthermore, we used bluetooth sensors to track consumers: which stores they entered, and for how long. This information was accessible to businesses via a dashboard which enabled them to build relationships with their frequent clientele.

• Designed and built Hotspot's blog (via custom WordPress website from scratch).
• Designed and coordinated the production of hundreds of bilingual (French and English) stickers to go on over 600 parking meters in Fredericton NB and Halifax NS.
• Designed all B2C and B2B facing bilingual (French and English) marketing and instructional materials.
• Designed version 1 and 2 of their iOS and Android hybrid app.
• Designed all stationary: business cards, letter heads, tall banners.

I worked closely with the Founder and CEO, Andrew Bedford, and their Senior WordPress Developer. I learnt how to build custom WordPress websites, using HTML, CSS/Sass, PHP and media queries for responsiveness.

• Designed and built custom WordPress websites for various clients in New Brunswick, including NBPower and the Fredericton Airport. 
• Trained clients on how to use and update their own websites on Wordpress.
• Shifted development from using CSS to Sass.
• (Some) logo and print design.

Michael Rurka🇨🇦