Renato Ferro: Product Designer

Designer.
Technologist.
Artist.

I'm a multidisciplinary product designer & strategist with over 20 years of work experience, based in San Francisco. I've assisted startups and companies in multiple fields, envisioning, shaping, and building innovative and rich cloud-based applications. My expertise spans digital product design and media & entertainment industries, from user experience design of AI, Data Analysis & BI tools, 2D & 3D CAD, and No/Low-code applications to motion design, visual effects, and games.

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Datagrid.ai | 2023 - Present

Product Designer

At Datagrid, I led product design and AI strategy from zero to one, creating a new AI product with user-friendly AI Agent features and tools that can automate tasks and take actions on your behalf to ingest, transform, and enrich data for non-technical data users. This work played a key role in the company's strategic pivot and growth.
Spearheaded AI strategy and experience at Toric by identifying high-value, low-risk AI features to drive product adoption and growth. Conducted research and gathered customer insights to inform strategic decision-making and product development.

Toric | 2020-2023

Director, User Experience

I've been leading and developing a group of passionate and highly collaborative designers, working cross-functionally with engineers, product, marketing, and branding teams balancing in a fast growth pace, customers, and business needs.

Autodesk | 2019-2020

UX Architect & Strategist

At Autodesk Forge organization, I designed, championed, and embedded quantitative and qualitative research methods and frameworks like Jobs to be Done and journey mapping to help understand, expose, and track customer needs in the problem and solution space, allowing agile teams, stakeholders, and leadership to communicate and track customer impact in a more effective and efficient manner. I contributed to creating and implementing key customer-centricity projects inside the company, such as Customer Councils, Customer Knowledge DB, and the "Value of Forge" studies.

Autodesk | 2018-2019

Creative Lead & UX Manager

As a leader and manager, I co-led the product experience, vision, advocacy, and guidance of current and Nextgen Forge Platform offerings, ranging from the Autodesk Forge Developer Portal to Autodesk Human Interface Guidelines, as well as new strategic SDKs and APIs to expand Forge offerings, the Nextgen Forge Cloud Platform, and a no/low code cloud-based application. I developed methods and frameworks to evaluate, measure, and monitor the quality of the platform's APIs and SDKs. In addition, I co-led and contributed to projects for the ADSK design system that helped 250+ designers cross-company, decentralize design system maintenance, and contribute as a community to all Interaction design patterns. In addition, I led a unique 2D and 3D model space design system that was exclusive to Autodesk's Nextgen Forge Cloud Developer Platform.

Media & Entertainment

Creative, Animator and Art Director

Throughout my 14-year career in motion design and computer graphics, I’ve worked with Fortune 500 companies, producing 2D and 3D animation for commercial campaigns for agencies and clients such as Pepsi, Nike, Coke, and Bell TV, among others. I enhanced the creative, design, and production processes and managed cross-functional teams of generalists, animators, compositors, developers, and look dev artists while working as a creative and technical director and animator at various companies.