Hi, I'm Andrew

I’m a design engineer and team leader — the kind of professional who not only designs and builds in the same breath, but also leads others to do the same. Where many designers hand off to developers, I carry work through to production while managing and guiding cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality outcomes. My core skillset spans UX design, front-end engineering, native mobile and responsive web development, and AI workflow integration.

© Andrew Deegear 2026

Down with the System

I inherited a basic design system which I continuously evolved, based on usage and tech needs, creation of a Design Council and managing a component library.

Building the Self-Managing Team

• Built and led a 7-person UX team across complex product ecosystems
• Created SOPs that increased velocity, quality, and team morale through 4 reorgs
• Scaled and evolved a custom design system beyond standard frameworks
• Delivered 6 enterprise applications supporting 500k users in billions of dollars of transactions.Below are a few examples of systems I created to organize the team.

Design Demo-lition

Set up and smoothed out the 'dog and pony show' for our design work.

Trust the Process

Inspired by a book on owning your own processes (E-myth Revisited), I put pen to proverbial paper and forged our agreements among the team and with our partners.This clarified a large amount of uncertainty and let the team focus on what they do best—design.

It's Party Time

Getting the right people on an order is crucial to closing it on time—the number of potential parties involved here is mind-numbing.I kicked off the project and then guided one of my Senior Designers in how to structure this beast, including her setting boundaries with a PM who liked to skip research and a front-end engineer who played designer.

Check, One-Two...

We all can remember the lengthy checklist when closing on a home—this is the big brother of that on the commercial side.It's interactive and digital, however, speeding up the process and allowing for much more variation and convenience.(More to come)

It's Important to Stay Mobile

Pushing the envelope for CRE on mobile.(More to come)

USAA-to-Schwab Transfer

DevOps: GitHub Blog Platform

Created for development-savvy bloggers desiring to internally socialize their team's work.I worked with Executive Greg Storey of WordPress, fame, to strategize and launch.

DesignOps: Testing and Kanban

Pioneered in-house Design Validations for USAA Design, cutting turnaround time from 3 weeks to 4 days.Also, converted team to a continuous delivery kanban process instead of scrum to reduce time wasted pointing, carrying over, and repointing.

Fund Recommendation for Advisors

When on the phone with a member, Advisors needed a tool to help them select the right fund and to generate the right documentation for support and regulation.

Robo-Advisor

In 2016 we launched a trimmed-down investment advisor to compete with the headline-grabbing Wealthfront. Here are several areas where I contributed.

Designing the Web

A small sampling of past web design projects.Each project typically involved collaborating on the design, coding into a CMS, and setting up the server.

AI UI

Our rough dev projects in AI needed to be fashioned into a functional experience ready for employees, so I quickly built out a strategy.Below you can see the original document processor, where it extracts information from scanned PDFs of Purchase Sale Agreements (PSAs).

I wanted it in our main SaaS design system for easy integration and maintenance later on. I also wanted our novice users to be able to use it out of the box, so I identified UX interactions that needed major enhancement.Below you can see the redesign in the design system, with improved UX.

The legal property description can be extracted as well (left) and activity tracked (right).

Handwritten dates are turned into milestones.

As well as relative phrases. Either can be highlighted while reviewing.

I tasked a senior designer with building the standalone tool into our CRE SaaS (ClarityFirst) as a first integration. Throughout this process, we collaborated on the direction and specifics.(more screens to come)

Data Visualizations

When validating student skill levels, we needed to visualize each cohort as it compared to expectations (dashed line).Here is an initial functioning prototype in Grafana for how to display this.

Training AI with Data Pipelines

Prevention programs often operate in a fragmented data environment... harmful behaviors, risk factors, and program outcomes live in separate systems, making it difficult to answer a simple question:Are our interventions actually working—and where should we act next?This project was developed to unify those signals into a single operational view, enabling leaders to move from reactive reporting to proactive intervention.

The Problem

Three core gaps emerged:

1. Lack of visibility
--- Harmful behaviors were tracked independently from upstream risk factors
--- No clear way to see emerging patterns early
2. Disconnected evaluation
--- Program success was measured in isolation
--- Limited ability to tie outcomes back to real-world impact
3. Slow decision cycles
--- Analysts had to manually assemble reports
--- Leadership lacked real-time situational awarenessThe result: decisions lagged behind reality.

The Solution

Create a data-dense, operational dashboard with the following:

1. Model the system, not just the UI
Instead of starting with screens, I mapped the ecosystem which drove the architecture.
2. Prioritize Information Hierarchy Ruthlessly
Borrowing from Palantir operational tools, the interface emphasizes KPIs, visualizations, and breakdown panels.
3. Design for Cross-Filtering and Causality Exploration
A key insight: users don’t just need data, they need relationships between data.
4. Make evaluation a first-class citizen
Most systems treat evaluation as an afterthought. Here, it’s central.