“In pursuit of good design.”

Jan Harold Diaz is a generalist designing digital products and experiences for over 15 years for brands and well-funded startups.

Recently, I've scaled, managed and work with a talented design team, assisted in crafting product roadmaps and strategies, while improving design operations, collaboration processes. My experience includes building design systems and facilitating design-led workshops such as design sprints.

About me

My design roots

Born and raised in the heart of Manila, Philippines, I discovered my love for design at a very young age. Influenced by my father’s ingenuity, we grew up constantly tinkering things and inventing something because of necessity (and sometimes lack of resource).

By senior high school, I am already exposing and self-teaching myself HTML, Photoshop and Flash (Motion Graphics) leading me to design my first website through Geocities where I felt the rewarding feeling of being able to create something interactive and start of my passion in web design and its possibilities.

Early career

By college, I started learning CSS while acquiring strong foundation in graphic and multimedia design. I was strongly influenced by Japanese and European designs. Before I even finish college, I was hired to do full-time job in a web design and development agency, steadily growing and exposed to different types of projects for 7 years~.

My journey with startups

Around 2013-2014, Startups became the newest buzzword and started popping-up in the IT space in Metro Manila. The community leaders initiated meet-ups, hackathons and the likes leading me to a more fulfilling advancement in my career where I am working on designing products with the users instead of doing design for just for online presence, marketing and promotions.

With this, I was also able to invite/influence some of my colleagues to join hackathons such as Startup Weekend which led us to securing a 3-month accelerator program in Shanghai, China which is also my first job in a startup as a Lead Interaction Designer at Rumarocket.

By 2017, I joined First Circle as the Lead Product Designer where I built a design system from ground, including frontend development using PugJS, Stylus and a bit of vanilla JS for interaction purposes which helped me served 3 product teams including 10+ Engineers who was able to focus working on functionalities than rendering UI and layouts.

Becoming a manager

Fast forward to 2020, I joined PayMongo as their first full-time designer. I worked on the foundational design requirements including the design system as well. Eventually within the same year, I was assigned to be Product Design Lead where I scaled and managed the Product Design Team and its operations until October 2023. Through this opportunity, I was able to establish routines for highly collaborative environment for especialists and maintained a low attrition rate most of my stay.

Taking a break and exploring new opportunities

Currently, I am a full-time Dad for my first born, looking for the next workplace where I can continue pursuing opportunities to help design great products from zero to one.