Justin R. Freeman
Design Leadership & AI Transformation Executive
Design Team Leadership · Discovery · Intelligent Design Systems · Agentic AI Design · Org Transformation
Executive Summary
As a product design leader with 20+ years of experience, I tend to get brought in when the way a company builds product is putting it at risk. At Korn Ferry, design judgment had been outsourced to agencies, so I built an internal design organization with its own research, analytics, and design system. At Frontline, roadmaps were being committed before anyone looked at how customers worked, and customers were building workarounds and losing trust. I co-wrote the operating model that changed that, wrote the product vision the org adopted as its North Star, and built discovery into how decisions got made. Lately my focus has been agentic AI. I pride myself on using it as a product design tool that lets professionals focus on the strategic work and decision-making their job requires, by removing the mundane data tasks we used to ask of our users. My path ran from front-end development through interaction design and human-factors research into design leadership, which is why I love working on an actual product team whenever I get a chance to.
30+
Products across 6 enterprise portfolios
200+
Engineers on the design system we created
150+
Customer engagements led
0→1
Agentic AI workflow, net new to the category (IEP)
Skills
Tools
Professional Experience
Frontline Education
Wayne, PA (Remote) | April 2022 – June 2026Head of UX
Hired to establish executive UX leadership and help evolve Frontline toward a customer-centered, product-enabled operating model by building the organizational capabilities needed to improve discovery, product strategy, and innovation across the organization.
- Embedded Discovery as an organizational capability through 150+ customer engagements and a formal research program across 71 customer organizations, documenting how much of a customer's day went to working around our software. Used that evidence to brief incoming executives and reshape roadmap planning.
- Wrote Jayden's Journey, the enterprise product vision that aligned executive leadership around the Better Together strategy. At a time when the organization had no shared approach to building product, it gave the org its focus and became its North Star.
- Co-wrote Frontline's product-enabled operating model with the Director of Operations, then selected the tools, brought them in, and trained the organization on the new processes.
- Grew and led a UX organization to 10 Product Designers and 2 Researchers, and took part in hiring Product Managers and Software Engineers, scaling UX coverage across 30+ active products in six enterprise portfolios.
- Established the Backpack Design System, a scalable design foundation adopted by 200+ engineers that improved consistency and accelerated delivery.
- Created Frontline's ADA accessibility program in partnership with the Director of Operations and AudioEye, aligning our products to WCAG 2.2 to meet Colorado's HB21-1110 accessibility law and keep customers who were at risk of leaving.
- Conceived the Frontline Intelligence Engine (FIE) and presented it to the executive leadership team: an AI repository pairing research and workaround evidence with support-ticket and customer-health data from Customer Success, so roadmap ideas were ranked by real demand before teams committed. Its concepts later evolved through Dovetail, Lovable, and Figma.
- Led a five-day Google Design Sprint reimagining the IEP experience through an AI-first lens. The research showed the friction sat in data collection rather than professional judgment, informing an agentic concept that drafted the foundation of an IEP from source-system data.
- Reported to the CPO and served as the trusted partner for selecting and standing up the organization's product platforms, including AudioEye, Pendo, Lovable, Dovetail, and Figma, establishing AI-enabled discovery and prototyping workflows.
- Led the SPM progress reporting and ERP Purchase Order redesigns end to end, validated at 4.75/5 and 4.3/5 for ease of use, with 9 of 9 tested users preferring the new ERP workflow.
Korn Ferry
Philadelphia, PA | 2017 – 2022Senior Manager, UX & Interaction Design
Recruited to mature Product Design by building the organizational capabilities needed to support Korn Ferry's enterprise SaaS portfolio, strengthening Product and Engineering partnerships while reducing reliance on outsourced design.
- Built Korn Ferry's internal Product Design organization, recruiting, hiring, and mentoring designers across multiple agile teams and moving the company off vendor-dependent design delivery.
- Established foundational product capabilities including Discovery, Research, Product Analytics, and an enterprise Design System.
- Partnered with executive leadership to bring customer insight into product strategy and roadmap discussions earlier, establishing Design as a strategic partner within product delivery.
- Led implementation of Pendo, giving product teams behavioral analytics that improved planning and prioritization.
- Led design and validation of KF Careers, a future-state employee engagement concept on Microsoft Teams, researched with 20 potential users.
Earlier Experience
Senior Interaction Designer & Information Architect — SunGard Availability Services
Wayne, PA | 2014 – 2017Lead Product Designer for an enterprise business continuity product within an empowered cross-functional team; introduced Discovery practices and redesigned the reporting experience with cascading data fields. Recognized with the AS Impact Award within six months.
Lead Interaction Designer — Bresslergroup
Philadelphia, PA | 2012 – 2014Designed digital experiences for complex physical products, conducting ethnographic research, contextual inquiry, and human factors studies alongside industrial designers and engineers.
Lead UX Designer — MDconnectME
2012 – 2013Discovery at Johns Hopkins, experience design, and front-end code for a surgical-progress app.
Project Manager / Lead Interaction Designer — Dudnyk Healthcare Marketing
2010 – 2012Led all web and mobile development as project manager and lead interaction designer.
Additional Experience
Design and development roles at Brody Professional Development, ProtonMedia, Deloitte, AstraZeneca, MedCases, and PartMiner. 2000 – 2010
Education
The Art Institute of Philadelphia — Multimedia Technologies