Ash
Brown
I build and lead design organizations that make complex enterprise software feel inevitable.
I build and lead design organizations that make complex enterprise software feel inevitable.
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View Résumé ↗A five-year modernization of the firm's flagship execution platform. Consolidated twelve regional products into a single system of record, reduced cancel/replace latency by a third, and earned buy-in from trading leadership on all three continents.
Request access →Led design for an enterprise risk platform serving the firm's market, credit, and operational risk functions. Established the research practice from scratch, ran embedded studies on four trading floors, and shipped a unified workspace now used by 4,000+ employees daily.
Request access →Here are five things I hold to — the ideas I'd want a hiring manager, founder, CPO, or a new team member to read before we meet.
A design org's job is to raise the floor of what ships, everywhere, every day — not to decorate the ceiling with a few hero screens. That requires systems, critique rituals, and the humility to subtract yourself from the work.
Traders, risk managers and ops staff don't want delight; they want a product that respects their domain, their velocity, and the decade of muscle memory they've built. The craft is in the precision, not the polish.
I want designers who can defend a point of view in a room with a managing director and change their mind when the evidence changes. A beautiful portfolio that can't survive contact with a trading floor is worth very little.
What gets on it — reviews, 1:1s, cross-functional rituals, quiet hours, learning — is the strongest signal of what you actually value. I spend more time on operating cadences than on any single design.
Every decision I make is, quietly, also a decision about what the team will still be able to do without me. If the work only works because I'm there, I've built the wrong thing.
Advising two early-stage fintechs — one on trade surveillance, one on private-markets data — on their first design hires.
Andy Grove's High Output Management (again), and a stack of essays on calm technology.
What the next decade of AI in trading workflows asks of designers who've spent a career hiding model output behind the glass.
Head of Design roles, board seats, and occasional advisory engagements where the work is reaching for positive transformation.