Rommel Rojas is a hands-on design leader who uses design as a strategic capability, turning AI into trusted experiences, building organizations that scale, and creating lasting business value.
Selected work
AI-XDLC. An AI-driven product design lifecycle with human review at every gate.
Dow Jones Platform AI Experience. Designing AI capabilities for one of the world's most trusted research corpora.
Nerva. Designing and building a zero-to-one internal AI workflow tool for product and design teams.
Spine. Turning a written story into voice, image, and conversation through AI.
Sustainalytics.com Revamp. One site, two audiences: rebuilding a B2B marketing platform for institutional investors and corporate clients.
Global Access. Redesigning a client research platform so it could take on new products without breaking.
How I lead
I believe design leadership is about creating clarity, building trust, and helping other people do their best work. My goal is not to be the center of every decision; it's to build the systems, standards, and team confidence that let good decisions happen without bottlenecks.
Read more about my approachFour practices I bring to every team
- AI product design. Grounded search, standing monitors, governed agent workflows. I prototype in code against live APIs. Player-coach in the tools
- Executive strategy. Design translated into outcomes: bundle architecture, pricing tiers, premium AI as a differentiator. Designers who bring alternatives, not just answers. Design fluent in business
- Data fluency. Evidence as part of the component. Answers cite sources, charts declare confidence, prototypes are paired with research and data. Evidence-led design
- Systems thinking. One AI experience system across Factiva, WSJ, and the platform, with patterns and governance that let independent teams move fast. One system, many surfaces
Where I think product design is going
The next step for product design is not designers making screens faster with AI. It is designers deciding the conditions under which an agent is allowed to do design work at all: what counts as done, which failures block, and which decisions stay human. Design judgment becomes explicit, checkable, and accountable, and the designer's job moves from producing every artifact to owning the rules and the gates. I have built and run this end to end, from a written methodology to a working tool, and the results are on the AI-XDLC page.
Three shifts
- The unit of work becomes the decision. Artifacts are generated and verified; people spend their time at the gates, where judgment is needed.
- Taste becomes legible. Brand, accessibility, and trust rules are written so a machine can check them, and every human correction can become a rule the team keeps.
- Exploration gets cheap enough to change behaviour. When a full lifecycle costs minutes and a few dollars, developing several directions to a verified spec is routine, not a luxury.
What this kind of design leader owns
- Post-conditions and gates. Defines what an agent must satisfy before design work moves forward, and where it must stop.
- Standards as constraints. Encodes brand, accessibility, and trust rules so they are checked on every artifact, not presented in a deck once.
- The human boundary. Decides which decisions stay with people and designs the escalation path that brings them there.
- Visibility. Makes the cost, time, and provenance of AI-assisted work auditable for product, engineering, and legal partners.
- Compounding quality. Turns human corrections into team rules, so each project raises the floor for the next.