About
Me

Portrait of Michal Lenik

I am a product design leader who focuses on design strategy, partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and Business teams, while championing design's role across the organization.

My design philosophy is rooted in practicality and functionality, aiming to solve problems for both users and the business. I lead with a servant-leadership mindset, creating psychologically safe environments where designers can thrive.

Work

*Product Design Leader @ Grubhub— July 2024 – current
*Founding Designer @ Earnee— March 2023 – current
Manager, Product Design @ Vanguard— Oct 2022 – July 2024
Product Design Lead, Manager @ Bowery— Feb 2021 – Oct 2022
Sr. UX Designer @ HS1— Sep 2019 – Feb 2021
Sr. UX Designer/Manager @ Avalara, Business Licenses— May 2015 – Sep 2019

Leadership

(philosophy)

Leadership philosophy — transparency and servant leadership

Transparency: Don't make your team guess. Communicate honestly and often, set clear expectations and check in to make sure your team has clarity around how to best succeed in their roles.

Servant Leadership: Be your team's biggest advocate. Nurture and grow the team by providing support, encouragement, positive feedback and career growth opportunities.

Projects

(Selected)

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OBD Framework

Strategic Design & OBD Framework — bringing Outcome Based Design to Grubhub to help support Design/Product partnerships.

A strategic design partnership presentation.

View case study
OBD Framework — Strategic Design partnership presentation for Grubhub
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Earnee

Earnee is an app built to reduce friction moments in parenting while also exposing kids to the building blocks of financial literacy.

I am the founding designer at Earnee and designed the 0-1 app. Earnee is available for both Android and iOS and has over 120 monthly subscribers less than a year after launch.

I spend about 1–2 hours a month on Earnee to stay connected to design work. I find it helps me be a better design leader by drawing from my own experiences while coaching others.

Download Earnee
Earnee app screens — family home, kid profile, and reminders
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Pacelift

Participant Site & FAS — the case for Constellation. I initiated and oversaw the migration of all of Vanguard's B2B products to the new design system, Constellation, and developed a process for adapting design system components for our B2B use cases.

Through this project I piloted a new, collaborative team structure previously unseen in our org, was able to ensure that all Vanguard's B2B products were WCAG compliant, provided an elevated and consistent user experience, saved the organization an average $2m annually in development costs and cut design delivery time by 30% for new projects.

View case study
Pacelift case study — Vanguard Participant Site and FAS redesign on the Constellation design system
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Designing Complex

While leading a team at Bowery Valuation, I coached a feature pod through the creation of a central comparables database that not only set the precedent for our company's data-reuse strategy but also significantly boosted our key success metrics.

Through this initiative, my team helped increase data reuse by an impressive 41% (a critical company-wide objective) and this project directly led to saving appraisers 30 minutes per appraisal report, when reusing comparables data.

View case study
Designing Complex case study — Bowery Valuation sales comparables search tool