Stefan Poulos
Product Design Leader / Staff & Principal Product Designer
SUMMARY
You get three designers in one with me: deep design systems expertise, hands-on product design, and big-picture creative vision. I built my foundation over a decade as Creative Director for Discovery Channel, then spent five years as Executive Creative Director at Pappas Group. Since going independent in 2014, I've embedded with teams at Pandora, Under Armour, Total Wine, Ellucian, and Macy's, most recently leading the design system behind Marriott's 40+ brands. I'm looking forward to bringing that experience to an in-house product team.
EXPERIENCE
Poulos Collective
Founder, UX/UI Product Design Consultant. I went independent to bring my expertise to more teams and find greater creative fulfillment. Most engagements span multiple years, with the trust and autonomy to work across teams, solve complex problems, and mentor other designers. All client engagements below were delivered through Poulos Collective.
Marriott International — Senior UX Design Systems Consultant
- Owned the end-to-end modernization of Marriott's global navigation (Q4 2023): full state matrix across authentication, page context, and breakpoint, componentized and aligned to the ARIES/PHOENIX engineering programs for build-ready handoff.
- Architected an end-to-end Figma-to-code pipeline connecting design tokens directly to production code, consolidating 35+ fragmented brand libraries into one token architecture spanning 40+ brands across a 9,000+ property portfolio, cutting brand CSS generation from months to days, and holding every token and component to Marriott's required WCAG AAA accessibility standard.
- Built and scaled Marriott's Omni design system to 100+ components (65+ in the original Web UI Kit, mapped to a 331-file React package), with a Figma library ecosystem spanning Foundation, Platform, Product, and Annotation kits.
- Built and shipped 10 productized Claude-based AI skills across the design team, reframed to leadership as team-wide standards for working with AI; cut Confluence dev-guide production from multi-day manual effort to hours and legacy-to-Omni component conversion from hours of expert work to minutes.
- Regularly presented design and brand strategy to VP-level leadership; most recently reframed the luxury portfolio's token-based design-language approach and clarified the boundary between aesthetic distinction (design system) and journey distinction (cross-functional).
- Led the org-wide migration from Sketch to Figma, the second of two such migrations, training teams through hundreds of workshops and sessions.
Pandora A/S — Design Lead & Design System Architect
- Led the full site redesign for Pandora's transition to the SFRA backend, optimizing mobile-first design across navigation, PLP, PDP, cart, checkout, and account.
- Redesigned and fine-tuned the cart and checkout flow to reduce checkout friction, using funnel analysis to target the highest-friction steps (shipping and payment) and resolve the tension between guest-checkout preference and the loyalty program's sign-up requirement; rolled out phased fixes across US, FR/ES, and UK markets.
- Built a comprehensive digital style guide and Figma design system in partnership with engineering, defining grid, typography, color, and spacing standards, leading the org's migration from Sketch to Figma along the way, the first of two such migrations.
- Designed shopping features including a virtual try-on experience, interactive gift finder, and custom bracelet builder.
Marriott International — UX Design Consultant
- Designed the account merge experience for the 2018 Marriott Rewards/Starwood Preferred Guest loyalty program integration, one of the largest loyalty program mergers in hospitality.
- Redesigned Marriott's room-and-rate search and sort experience, backed by quantitative and qualitative research, resolving a rate-complexity problem spanning thousands of properties.
Ellucian — Design Systems Consultant
- Set UX and visual design direction across Ellucian's higher education software portfolio, operationalizing its design system for product teams.
Additional engagements
- Macy's/Bloomingdale's (retail: e-commerce and next-gen shopping features), Under Armour (sportswear: mobile e-commerce and connected fitness concepts), Total Wine (retail: loyalty account redesign), GetWellNetwork (healthcare: platform brand direction), Cvent (event management software: global design system), and Compass (real estate: platform UX).
Pappas Group
Executive Creative Director
- Transformed Pappas into a strategic full-service agency, establishing new roles and creative/production workflows; led new-business pitches securing Virgin America, Syfy, Geico, and African Wildlife Foundation.
- Led UX for Virgin America's in-flight seatback entertainment system.
- Helped grow Pappas Group from 15 people to more than 60 before its acquisition.
- Managed a team of 6 to 8 art directors.
Discovery Communications
Creative Director
- In-house Creative Director directing print, outdoor, broadcast, animation, and interactive campaigns for Discovery Channel and Science Channel's most recognizable programs, including Deadliest Catch, Dirty Jobs, MythBusters, Planet Earth, and Shark Week, reaching audiences in 170 countries.
- Directed the award-winning Future Weapons campaign, driving 5M+ visitors to the program's website within 30 days.
- Managed a team of 3 to 5 art directors.
EXPERTISE
- Design Systems
- Atomic architecture, design tokens, governance, accessibility (WCAG AAA), web and native app alignment
- Figma
- Variables, component properties, library management, custom plugins, Figma-to-code automation
- UX & Product
- E-commerce, search, account and loyalty experiences, enterprise software, information architecture
- Creative Direction
- Brand strategy, design language, executive alignment, motion and animation direction
- AI & Automation
- Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, agentic workflows, design-to-code pipelines
- Mentorship & Training
- Hundreds of Figma, systems, and AI-workflow sessions; two org-wide Sketch-to-Figma migrations
- Writing
- Design systems, AI, and craft at stefanpoulos.substack.com
EDUCATION
Ringling College of Art & Design
BFA, Design Communication · 1993 – 1997