profile-bchau

Hi, I’m Brandon Chau, a digital product designer based in Los Angeles specializing in interface design for web and iOS.

Hi, I’m Brandon Chau, a digital product designer based in Los Angeles specializing in interface design for web and iOS.

I currently work at AdColony leading product design and product strategy for scalable operational and creative tools used by clients and employees around the globe. Previously, I worked as the founding Creative Director at AdColony helping grow the business from a fledgling 5 person, $0 start-up to a 500+ staffed, $350 million global ad empire. Prior to AdColony, I lead art direction at Jirbo, a mobile gaming start-up, producing game art, interfaces and trailers for 200 of the earliest casual games and apps in the Apple App store.

Over the 10+ years of my career, my experience has spanned across user interface design, brand & identity design, motion graphics, creative direction, and team leadership & development.

 

Hi, I’m Brandon Chau, a digital product designer based in Los Angeles specializing in interface design for web and iOS.


Founding member of AdColony Product Design and Creative Services teams. Saw business from early-stage startup through successful exit of $350M by Opera Software in 2014 and continued growth to an 800+ employee, world-wide organization.

I am a Product Designer with a background in designing enterprise dashboards, operations tools, creative ad unit builders, and other business critical products. I love to dive deep into research, simplify the complex, and collaborate with tightly-knit, cross-functional teams. As a manager I believe in recognition, transparency, and iterative learning.

I am also an experienced Product Manager with insight into conceptualizing, planning, and success-tracking of short and long term features; writing and organizing clear feature specification documents; and successfully managing the product development cycle to impact and increase performance metrics.

 

Founding member of AdColony Product Design and Creative Services teams. Saw business from early-stage startup through successful exit of $350M by Opera Software in 2014 and continued growth to an 800+ employee, world-wide organization.

I am a Product Designer with a background in designing enterprise dashboards, operations tools, creative ad unit builders, and other business critical products. I love to dive deep into research, simplify the complex, and collaborate with tightly-knit, cross-functional teams. As a manager I believe in recognition, transparency, and iterative learning.

I am also an experienced Product Manager with insight into conceptualizing, planning, and success-tracking of short and long term features; writing and organizing clear feature specification documents; and successfully managing the product development cycle to impact and increase performance metrics.

 

SPECIALIZATIONS

  • Design Leadership: Career Development, Design Mentorship, Cross Team Alignment, Product Design Strategy, Design Recruiting, Design/Customer Evangelist, End to End Product Design Process, Executive and Client Interface, Product Development Process.

  • Product Management: Product Requirements, Project Management, Go to Market Strategy, User Interviews, Key Performance Indicators, MVP Design.

  • Product Design: User Experience, User Interface Design, Visual Design, Systems Oriented Design, Quality Assurance, Prototyping, Visual Identity Systems, Design Spec Documentation, Data Visualization, SaaS Enterprise Product Design.

  • Creative Direction: Branding Systems, Illustration, Art Direction, RFP Strategy, Motion Graphics, Interactive Advertising, Mobile Advertising,  Event Branding.

 

 

WORK EXPERIENCE

Senior Manager, Product Design
Liftoff / Vungle
Apr 2021 — Present

Head of Product Design for all customer facing product lines including Liftoff Direct, Vungle Monetize, Tresensa Ad Builder, Jetfuel Influencer Marketing, and Gamerefinery Market Intelligence. Owned Integration Product Strategy integrating several products and services as cross functional features available to several customer cohorts. Worked cross functionally align product development process across all product teams where user experience requirements are involved.

  • Managed 4 Product Design ICs and 1 UX Writer. Head of Design across all UI product including DSP/Advertising, Monetization, Influencer Marketing, Creative Builders, and Market Intelligence.

  • Developed and evangelized Product Strategy to integrate product features from 4 recently acquired businesses into the core Vungle product. Interviewed 18 senior executives and presented strategy and prototype to entire organization within first 3 months of being hired.

  • Unified Product Design and Product Development process across all Product/Design/Engineering squads across the organization with an emphasis on gathering early consensus and recurring weekly progress checks on objectives, key results, and milestones.

  • Established User Research knowledge hub containing interviews with external customers and internal customer stakeholders. Created best practices guides and processes that generated over 30+ user interviews each with corresponding takeaways and insights over a 9 month period.

 

Director, Design & Product Management
AdColony
Jan 2018 — Mar 2021

 

Product owner of the Portal, the central operations and analytics dashboard of the organization. I act as the single point of contact for global commercial and operation teams with regard to feature development, onboarding, and support throughout the Portal. I also lead strategy, vision, and rationale for all feature development and ensure mission critical features are translated into usable features within the scope of available resources. I also partner with other Product Managers and Product Teams to execute product features with cross-product dependencies. On top of all that, I still run the full Product Design pipeline for the Portal (Operations and Analytics Dashboard) while leading design efforts on Composer (Rich Media Ad Unit Builder).

  • Product owner of the Portal, the operations and analytics dashboard servicing all employees and clients across the organization.

  • Led automation strategy to reduce human error and adapt network supply and demand to programmatic (RTB) standards.

  • Launched Universal Ad Format, enabled business to scale delivery of previously proprietary ad formats to open and programmatic supply sources with the same source assets.

  • Launched a suite of bulk operational tools, that boosted operational throughput by as much as 1200% for certain common tasks.

  • Brought to market self-service Campaign Management tools allowing all clients to manage their own campaign activity without requiring intervention of account managers.

  • Support all stages of product design execution (including strategy, research, ideation, prototyping, testing, iteration, execution).

 

Director, Product Design
AdColony
Apr 2014 — Dec 2018


Led and managed an incredible group of hybrid UX and Visual Product Designers unifying design vision and voice across all product lines, mentoring talent, fostering career growth, running critiques and user interviews, and ensuring first-class user experience execution through all user-facing products across the AdColony organization. Built design team of 5 Product Designers servicing over 10+ product lines across web, iOS, and Android.

  • Built high performing design team to 5 Product Designers servicing over 10+ product lines across web, iOS, and Android. Responsible for recruiting and developing talent as well as ensuring teams are delivering high-quality work that delivers on business strategy and mission. Led 2 team members to promotions to senior roles.

  • Work cross-functionally with leaders of other functions (e.g. Product, Design, Engineering, QA, Operations and Sales) to develop and execute product development process, ensuring that teams are collaborating effectively to execute on company strategy. Champion user experience across all user facing product lines across the organization.

  • Led art direction of design systems across consumer, enterprise, and operational user experiences to streamline production, familiarity, and efficiency. Ensure teams are delivering high-quality work that delivers on business strategy and mission. 

 

Creative Director
AdColony
Feb 2011 — Mar 2014

 

Responsible for all aspects of design throughout the organization including Creative Services (Interactive and Motion Graphics), Brand Identity Marketing, and UI/UX Design. Grew an incredible team of designers (comprised of both employees and contractors) from the ground up producing award winning Interactive and Video Creative for Fortune 500 companies and top mobile gaming companies. Notable Brand clients include: Disney, Nike, McDonalds, Toyota, P&G, Unilever, Microsoft, Samsung; notable Performance clients include: Supercell, Rovio, Zynga, Machine Zone.

  • Core skills included visual design and art direction, interaction design, motion design, project management, and occasionally developing code.

  • Established process pipelines between Sales, Creative, and Ad Unit Engineering to maximize efficiency and quality during a period of explosive growth. Established best practices and overall Creative Direction across all video and interactive creative deliverables. Scaled Creative services output to deliver over 15x in ad revenue over 3 years.

  • Partnered with Sales and Engineering leadership to define mobile ad unit frameworks for scalable and responsive premium Ad Units across all mobile device types and sizes.

  • Partnered with engineers to build reusable Ad Unit widgets such as video-thumbnails, store locators, and movie ticket schedulers. Designed and hand-coded the company’s App Install End Card, which drove all App Installs comprising over 75B+ Impressions in the organization from 2012 - 2016.

  • Established AdColony brand identity across digital, web, and print. Designed, developed, and maintained adcolony.com marketing website from 2013 - 2015 using HTML, SASS/CSS, JQuery/Javascript, and PHP.

  • Led organization to bring creative quality of our in house Ad Units to the forefront of business model from an added-value to a competitive advantage in the mobile video advertising space.

  • Responsible for all UI/UX design deliverables to Product and Engineering teams.

 

Creative Lead
Jirbo, Inc.
Jan 2009 — Jan 2011

 

  • Led Game Art and Creative Advertising teams. Core skills included art direction, illustration, UI design, and motion graphics design.

  • Recruited and maintained relationships with freelance video producers.

  • Led Art Direction and Design for all Jirbo Games (200+) mobile apps across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, PalmOS, including multiple Top 10 iOS products such as Sovereign: Kingdoms, Tap Reef, and more.

 

Web Designer / Front End Developer
UCLA Arts
Sep 2008 — Jul 2009

  • Collaborated with Department Chair and other faculty stakeholders to launch a publicly accessible video archive of notable guest lecturer presentations given at the Design | Media Arts campus at UCLA. Responsible for design and front end development.

  • Partnered with design leads and faculty stakeholders to realize the department rebranding through all web identity executions.

  • Performed regular content updates and design adjustments in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and SQL

 

Primary Guide
UCLA Outdoor Adventures
Sep 2007 — Jul 2009

  • UCLA Outdoor Adventures is a division of the Recreation Department that offers UCLA students and community guided backpacking, rock climbing and kayaking trips in wilderness areas surrounding Los Angeles.

 

Out of Office Activities

If you've made it this far down the page, and still want to learn a little more about me, you can check out some photos I've posted to Instagram. I'm very dedicated to getting outside as often as I can, especially to climb, surf, hike, and spending time with great folks.  🧗🏻‍♂️🏄🏻‍♂️🏕😎