You need a Fractional
Design Leader.
That's me.

Hi Josh. I'm Don Roach, a product design leader looking for my next fractional design leadership or founding designer engagement, the kind of situation where design and engineering overlap is an asset instead of a novelty.

I've spent most of a career in banking and fintech, the kind of high-stakes, compliance-heavy environment where a design decision gets checked by legal before it gets checked by a user. That background travels well into whatever your clients are building next.

I joined Q2's design org in 2015 as a Senior UX Designer, when it was 6 people. I helped grow it to 40+ designers, researchers, and an accessibility specialist, advancing through Lead, Manager, Senior Manager, and Director along the way. As Director I led 15 designers and 2 managers directly, and as Senior Manager I built a tracking system that managed 75+ features per quarter.

Since leaving Q2 in November 2024, I've been building with Claude Code daily. Most days I'm in the CLI more than Figma, which puts me squarely in the design plus engineering profile you're placing people into.

This isn't my first finish line. I'm ready for the next one.

Schedule a chat

Outcomes, not outputs.

$1B

Funded Assets on the Product I Designed at Q2

5M+

Users on Q2's Platform

3 months

Zero to Shipped, Dual-Sided App at FieldPay

85%

Workflow Time Cut With AI-Built Automation Pipelines

<1 quarter

For Shadow Spreadsheets to Disappear After the Dispute Queue Redesign

6 → 40+

Design Org I Helped Scale at Q2

The Work

Funded Accounts: Scaling Design Through Compliance and Complexity

A banking product with two competing audiences, bank admins and end users, and no room for error because compliance was watching every screen.

The Problem

Funded accounts at Q2 was a complex, multi-stakeholder product. Bank admins and end users wanted different things from the same flows, and every decision had to survive high-stakes compliance constraints before it could ship.

What I Did

I led a 5-designer team through a complete UX overhaul. I drove cross-functional alignment across Product, Engineering, and Compliance, and ran user research directly with bank customers, iterating in sprints rather than waiting for a big-bang redesign.

Outcome

The product reached $1B in funded assets, with measurable improvement in user task completion along the way.

“Don is an experienced and exceptional UX leader, fully capable of managing and growing a large design team. Any company would be fortunate to have him.”

Lisa Wade · Senior Director, Q2 · Don's manager for several years

Why This Role

I saw your posts and recognized the profile you're describing, because it's the one I've been building toward since I left Q2. I'm not looking for a full-time seat behind a desk. I'm looking for fractional design leadership or a founding designer situation where someone who can move between strategy and the CLI is genuinely useful, not a stretch hire. If you're working with companies that need that combination, I'd like to be on your radar.

Let's talk about who needs this next.