
Validity EngagePassword protected
Modular, on-demand fixes for an AI email QA platform
Ryan Magalhaes · Boston, MA
Senior product designer with 10+ years across product, brand and web. I lead 0-to-1 work on complex, technical products.
Side projects, mostly to learn a new tool by building with it.
A small browser game starring Sage, my one-ear-up island dog, who will chase a tennis ball until the sun goes down.
A working drum machine in the browser, modeled on classic hardware like the 808. I grew up playing drums.
A tool for logging design decisions as they happen and sharing them with a link. Since retired, but worth the lessons.
I'm a senior product designer with more than 10 years of experience, most of it spent making complicated things clear. Today that means 0-to-1 product work on an AI platform at Validity. Before that, I designed developer onboarding at Akoya and led brand and web projects at agencies.
That range is how I work. I can run the research, set up the design system, prototype in code, and design the identity and website that carry a product to market. Alongside full-time work, I still take on brand, web and product projects.
With a two-person design team and PMs prototyping their own ideas, I moved from drawing screens to setting the tokens and patterns everyone builds with.
Early on, I helped set up the design tokens and patterns for our new AI platform so teams could move fast from day one. Then speed and two different tech stacks did what speed does: the UI started to drift.
Soon after, the rest of my design team was laid off. Two of us were left, and PMs were prototyping their own ideas, which I think is a good thing. But I couldn't review every prototype, and their UIs didn't quite feel right, even when I could tell what they were going for. They didn't need critique. They needed clearer guardrails.
An interactive reference for our app chrome. It shows how headers work, how child pages nest, and the grid and column structure, with notes for engineering. I also added sample layouts, because column rules alone weren't enough. Structure tells you where things can go, and layouts show what good looks like.
Then I turned it into a Claude skill. It carries the chrome, containers, columns and layouts, and pulls the real design system tokens and primitives, so a prototype built with it fits the product without anyone memorizing the rules. The design system stays the source of truth; the skill is how it reaches people who don't live in Figma.
Seven PMs are using it so far. One told me: "This is solid, and loads better than what we have currently, so I am in favor of moving forward with this ASAP."
Design systems are becoming infrastructure for agents. Components, tokens, patterns and docs used to be written for people to read. Now they need to make sense to machines too.
I think of it as a progression: readable by people, then accessible to machines, then something machines can act on, and eventually something that can check its own work. The skill is a small step along that path.
In a corporate environment, the most useful design work right now is often the unglamorous kind: making the right path the easy path for everyone else.