Fred Truman • Product Design Leader
I joined MongoDB in 2013 as an early UX designer when the company had 300 employees and roughly $30M in revenue. Twelve years later I lead a global team of 70+ designers, researchers, UI engineers, and program managers helping scale a $2.4B enterprise data platform through the most significant shift in software development in a generation.
That arc — from designing the first version of MongoDB Atlas to building the org that now owns it — shapes everything about how I think about design leadership. I've seen what breaks at every stage of company growth, what decisions compound positively over time, and what you have to protect when the pressure to move fast threatens the things that actually matter.
As VP of Product UX, my work sits at the intersection of team architecture, product strategy, and craft. I've restructured the design org multiple times as the company evolved — navigating the tension between centralized design authority and embedded product teams, building leadership benches, and most recently leading the team through a strategic pivot from growth to profitability while retaining every critical person and maintaining engagement scores through the uncertainty.
My current thinking is focused on what design leadership looks like in an AI-augmented product org — not just how teams use AI tools, but how the role of design judgment changes when execution becomes cheaper and faster. I launched an innovation program for the UX team at MongoDB to get ahead of that question, and it's the problem I find most interesting right now.
Before MongoDB I designed products at Microsoft and SumAll, and spent earlier years in branding, graphic design, and creative technology — including ITP at NYU, where I learned to think about design and engineering as the same medium. I've supplemented that foundation with business and leadership study at Yale School of Management.
I'm a Mainer by birth, a Montclair resident by life, and someone who believes the most interesting design challenges right now sit at the intersection of developer experience, enterprise data, and AI — which is exactly where I've spent the last decade.