Colorado Springs, Colorado · Open to Senior, Lead, Staff & Design Manager roles
I turn technical complexity into clear, trusted product experiences, and help design teams do their best work.
10+ years across AI/ML, enterprise SaaS, healthcare, financial research, geospatial and federal platforms. Hands-on from zero-to-one concept through shipped product, and accountable for the designers who build it.
{{ m.context }}
Selected work
{{ c.body }}
Design leadership
At S&P Global I built and ran the design organization behind AI and NLP financial products: hiring, levels, critique cadence and career growth, while staying in the file on the hardest surfaces. A manager who stops designing stops being useful to designers.
Read the leadership pageWork
Six case studies. Most are shown with real shipped artifacts. A few sit inside security or NDA boundaries and are presented as sanitized narrative, with the decisions and reasoning intact.
{{ filterCount }}
Lead Product Architect / AI Product Design Lead · Sept 2025 – Present
Product vision, UX architecture and hands-on execution for AI-native SaaS platforms from discovery through production delivery. Full-stack prototypes in Figma, React and Python reduced manual workflow effort by roughly 40%.
Founder / Product Design Lead · Jan 2023 – Present
Zero-to-one strategy, design and implementation for AI-enhanced SaaS products across music, commerce, healthcare and enterprise workflows. Production-grade prototypes and design systems in Figma, React, Next.js, TypeScript and Python, shortening concept-to-validation cycles by roughly 30%.
To supply: approved screens, diagrams or a sanitized walkthrough for TectoniQ and HoytLabs before these become full case studies.
{{ study.org }}
{{ study.summary }}
NDA-safe presentation
{{ study.confidential }}
{{ sec.label }}
{{ para }}
Decision
{{ co.body }}
{{ sec.quote }}
{{ mm.l }}
{{ sec.note }}
Leadership
Design leadership is a craft discipline, not an administrative one.
I ran a 12–13 person design organization at S&P Global supporting AI and NLP financial products, setting direction, coaching designers across levels, and partnering with Product and Engineering leadership on portfolio strategy, roadmap planning, staffing and operating processes. Through all of it I kept designing: the hardest surface in a portfolio is where a design leader is most useful, and the fastest way to lose a team's trust is to stop being able to do the work.
{{ o.body }}
{{ pr.body }}
What I look for in a team
I hire for judgment under ambiguity, comfort with technical subject matter, and the willingness to show unfinished work early. Everything else, from tooling to domain to seniority mechanics, is teachable inside a good critique culture.
My job is to make that culture cheap to participate in: predictable critique, written decisions, a design system that removes low-value debate, and a direct line between a designer's work and the outcome it moved.
About
I came up through graphic and visual design, moved into web and interaction work, and have spent the last stretch of my career on complex digital products: AI/ML, enterprise SaaS, healthcare, financial research, geospatial and federal platforms. The through-line has never been a medium. It's been the same problem in different clothing: a system that is genuinely complicated, and a person who needs to make a confident decision inside it.
That's what pulled me into leadership. At S&P Global I built and ran a 12–13 person design organization for AI and NLP products, and found that the leverage of setting direction, hiring well and protecting a quality bar compounds in a way individual output can't. It's also what keeps me hands-on: I still design, still prototype in React and Python, and still believe the fastest way to resolve a debate about an AI interaction is to build the thing and use it.
Most of the domains I've worked in are high-stakes and regulated: healthcare claims, financial research, defense platforms. In those places a design decision is a trust decision. That's the work I want.
{{ a.era }}
{{ a.body }}
I'm finishing a B.S. in Cybersecurity at Full Sail University (expected 2026). It isn't a career change. It's the missing half of the products I already design. Secure federal AI, health records and financial research all live or die on trust, privacy and the integrity of what a user is shown. Knowing how those systems actually fail makes me a better designer of them, and a more credible partner to the engineers who build them.
B.S. Cybersecurity, in progress, Full Sail University, expected 2026
A.A.S. Graphic Design, Valencia College
Contact
Other professional profiles (Read.cv, GitHub, Dribbble) can be added here on request.
Message ready
If nothing happened, write to contact@roberthoytdesigns.com directly. I answer everything.
404
