David Janelle

I currently work at Drift designing new ways for marketers to leverage their company's content in our new AI-powered tools.

Prevously, I worked at Indigo Agriculture, a tech company in Boston, focusing on design systems, internal tools, platform experiences, and design team mentorship.

Before that, I led the creation of the design system at ezCater and drove the vision for their partner-facing experiences while working with three scrum teams.

My design career began at a start-up called Grasshopper that was eventually purchased by Citrix, where I worked for 7 years as the sole designer leading all design decisions and execution. 

I’m a quietly passionate design leader who loves to elevate design across organizations by bringing simplicity to complexity, evangelizing systems-thinking, and mentoring junior designers. 

Whether it’s taming design systems, refactoring my team’s design review process, helping product teams navigate design system questions, or building awesome Figma tooling for designers, my mission as a designer is to leave things better than I found them.

Design Process and Philosophy

I believe that designers are an equal partner on a problem-solving team, and it’s our job to help facilitate the team’s definition, exploration, and solution to a problem. We’re great at framing the problems of the user and the business through different lenses and creating artifacts to help change the way people think about a problem space.

I typically adjust my process to fit the needs of my users, the resources of my team, and the constraints of the problem.

I start with defining the problem: understanding the business and user needs and gathering information to see where our gaps are. I’ll reach for research and analytics to fill in those gaps, and explore ways we could solve the problem. I’ll iterate on feedback I gather from my explorations until we’re confident that our solution is a reasonable fit. I partner with engineers throughout implementation to help make trade-offs as they come up.

I bias towards action, and have become adept at balancing risk, cost, and impact to help make the decisions that will deliver value and learning quickly.

Interests and Hobbies

I’m a husband and dad of three amazing kids. When I’m not working or spending time with my family you’ll probably find me:

  • Competing with other drivers 2 inches off the ground in my racing kart
  • Learning C# while building an Indie game in Unity
  • Watching IndyCar or cheering for the Boston Bruins
  • In my garage woodworking shop measuring a bunch of times and cutting once