Mike Gowen
Product Designer
I'm a product designer who's spent more than 20 years in startups, doing my best work on fast-moving teams that are scaling hard or still chasing product-market fit. One of them was Delighted, which I co-founded as its only designer before we were acquired by Qualtrics. My strong suit is taking tangled, complicated experiences and making them clean and obvious. Building a company from scratch also taught me to prioritize under pressure and to design for every stage of a company's life. What excites me most lately is how much AI is reshaping the designer's role. Designing with it and building products around it feels like a whole new world, with a clean slate.
Shape Token
TGE landing page & brand identity
Shape is an Ethereum L2 blockchain, and $SHAPE is its governance token. The page had to fit within Shape's existing brand, so I used it as an opportunity to expand the design language and bring some intention to an identity that had been loosely defined.
Shape Redesign
Landing page for Shape L2
For Shape's main site, I wanted to embrace its iconic dot logo and build a visual system that could express the full range of Shape's benefits. I landed on a halftone pattern paired with a series of interconnected, animated nodes, and I built a tool to explore just how expressive that halftone patterning could be.
View the live page
deca.ai / pico
Agent-first NFT assistant
Pico started as Deca.ai, a personal NFT assistant you could ask anything about the market or the art. But as we built it, I realized the future of AI wasn't about pulling information from it, but about it proactively pushing things to you. So I shifted the product from answering questions to taking action: buying on your behalf, watching prices, even alerting you the moment an artist you follow dropped something new. This was all before agents became popular. It turned out to be the right direction, but the market wasn't ready, and we had to pivot.
Pico v2
Agent-first automated crypto trading
With no signs of the NFT market recovering, we made the hard call to stop building for NFTs and find product-market fit in fungible tokens instead. The plan was to apply the same agent-first logic to a new market: Pico would let you spin up agents to do all sorts of things, like managing a liquidity pool, dollar-cost averaging into your favorite coin, or rebalancing your portfolio on its own. But to get there, we needed to start narrow. So we focused on one thing: a dead-simple way for people new to crypto to manage a Uniswap LP. You funded the account, picked a couple of easy parameters, and Pico handled the rest.
Stack Redesign
User dashboard & loyalty program for Shape
Stack is a gamified loyalty system for the Shape Network, where people earn badges for participating on-chain. Redesigning it was one of the first things I took on when I joined Shape: giving the existing design a much-needed refresh and turning it into a proper social experience.
Deeple Redesign
Index & customization portal
Deeple are the unofficial mascots of the Shape Network, created by the beloved artist Deekay. I worked with DK to develop concepts for a much friendlier customization portal and index, all while staying true to the playful aesthetic he had already established.
Rodeo / Top 9
Art collection sharing
Top 9 is a feature I conceived and designed for Rodeo, inspired by user behavior. Noticing that users often manually create grids of their top posts to share on social media, I productized this behavior into a core feature, becoming the app's most popular.
Rodeo / Galleries
Art collection display
Galleries in Rodeo were designed as a solution to "collecting fatigue" - where users struggle to meaningfully interact with large collections. This feature allows collectors to curate and share their favorite posts, transforming passive accumulation into active curation and enhancing user engagement.
Rodeo / Spurs
Virtual currency
Spurs, Rodeo's internal currency, represent a strategic solution to simplify Web3 for our users. By implementing Spurs alongside Instagram authentication and gas sponsorship, we created a seamless user experience that abstracts away the technical complexities of cryptocurrencies, focusing on content and community.
Rodeo / Text
Creative tools
The Text Editor feature in Rodeo was developed to broaden user engagement beyond visual content. We designed highly leveraged text-based tools to empower users to create high-quality content regardless of their visual design skills, increasing overall platform engagement and inclusivity.
Rodeo / Partners
Integrated partnerships
The partnership landing modals for Rodeo were crafted to create tailored, welcoming experiences for our partner communities. These modals play a crucial role in onboarding specific user segments, exemplifying our attention to detail and commitment to creating personalized, brand-aligned experiences.
Rodeo / Rewards
Micro animations
In designing Rodeo, we crafted every interaction to be not just functional, but genuinely enjoyable. The rewards animation exemplifies this approach - a seemingly small feature that adds a moment of delight to the user experience, creating a more engaging and memorable product.
Pidgie Post
Handcrafted pixel art collectibles
Pidgie Post exemplifies my exploration into digital collectibles and blockchain technology. Each Pidgie NFT serves as a unique digital asset and communication tool. By creating the pixel art, designing and building the React website, I demonstrated my versatility as a designer in bringing playful, engaging concepts to life in the Web3 space.
Delighted
Simple customer satisfaction surveys
Delighted, founded in 2013, represents a significant milestone in my career. As a co-founder and sole designer, I crafted a customer feedback platform that revolutionized the way companies interact with their customers. We pioneered a simple, beautiful, and affordable NPS survey tool, showcasing my ability to identify market needs and design intuitive solutions.
10 INSCRIBE
On-chain generative art
10 INSCRIBE was a weekend project exploring ordinals on the Bitcoin blockchain, resulting in 42 unique NFTs. Inspired by the iconic Commodore 64 "10 PRINT" program, this collection bridges vintage computing with modern blockchain technology. This work highlights my capacity to quickly understand and implement novel paradigms, showcasing rapid ideation and execution skills.
Figma Plugins
Design tools
The development of Figma plugins demonstrates my commitment to improving design workflows. These plugins, such as the auto-cropping tool and layer order reversal utility, address real-world challenges faced by designers. This work showcases my technical versatility, combining design thinking with coding skills to streamline common design tasks.
