Product Design & Research Leader

I build and scale design teams that innovate, stay curious, and drive real impact.

During my time at Spotify, Meta/Oculus and Welltech I led product strategy and partnered with CPOs, CEOs and executive peers to shape what gets built, and why.

Welltech Return AI App

Product leadership · Retention & growth

AI Wellness App & Design Team Scaling

Built and led a 30+ person multidisciplinary team (designers, researchers, writers, and managers) across a portfolio of B2C health and behaviour-change products. Delivered a redesigned core app experience driving +7% first-time usage and −11% churn. Launched Return, an AI-driven wellness app with +13% higher retention.

Welltech

Spotify Wrapped

Product design · Subscription growth

Spotify Wrapped

Led the team building the annual personalised experience that became one of the most culturally shared moments in streaming. Shipped to 400M+ users across 180+ markets, driving measurable subscription growth and brand engagement year on year. The challenge wasn't making it beautiful, it was making it feel personal at scale, for hundreds of millions of people at once.

Spotify

Spotify Lossless

0→1 product · Spotify Premium

Lossless Audio Streaming

Led the team for Spotify's lossless audio tier from zero to launch including research strategy, concept definition, and end-to-end product experience. Required building a cross-company shared understanding of what "quality" means to different listener types, and translating that into something felt, not just heard.

Spotify

Oculus Go

Innovation · AR/VR

Oculus Go & Oculus Quest

Early design and research leader at Oculus, helping establish the UX frameworks and design principles for Meta's social VR platform. Led insights for Oculus Go — winner of Best Product at CES — and Oculus Quest, Meta's first 6DOF headset. Also shipped Workrooms and Venues, shaping how millions work and socialise in VR.

Meta / Oculus

Coming soon

Design for Failure

Most design frameworks celebrate the "happy path" - the seamless, idealised journey where users make no mistakes. But real life rarely works that way. This book argues that failure is not just inevitable but essential to good design. By learning from failure, predicting it, and designing for it, we build products that are more resilient, more empathetic, and ultimately more successful.

In progress

Spotify Insights · 2021

4 myths about tactical research

The tactical/strategic split in UX research is a false dichotomy and believing it limits the impact of the work. A case for why tactical research, done right, is some of the most powerful work a researcher can do.

Read on Medium →
📍Based in London 🔍Open to VP & Senior Design Director roles 🤖Excited about AI & product innovation 🚴Keen cyclist, runner & yogi
Raz Schwartz

Good design isn't decoration. It's the earliest form of product thinking. The best designed products I've been part of started not with a brief, but with a question: what does this person actually need, and why?

I've spent my career building and scaling multidisciplinary design, research and writing teams - 40+ people at Welltech, 10+ at Spotify and Meta - working directly with CPOs, CEOs and boards to shape product direction from the earliest stages.

My background is in Human-Computer Interaction research, which shapes how I lead: hypothesis-driven, evidence-grounded, with a high bar for craft and a clear view of what good looks like. I've built design systems, led monetisation and paywall design, driven subscription product strategy, and navigated global expansion across regulated markets. I'm now thinking carefully - and practically - about what AI means for design practice, for research, and for the organisations doing this work.

2023–2026 Welltech · Senior Director, Design, Research & Writing
2020–2023 Spotify · Head of New Product Innovation Design & Research
2014–2020 Meta / Oculus · UX Manager, AR/VR
2009–2014 Cornell University, Carnegie Mellon University · PhD, Human-Computer Interaction