L Dante Guarin — Fractional Design Lead · Product Design · Design Systems
Fractional design leadership that gets the work moving.
I help growing product teams make better decisions, build better products, and establish the design systems and practices they need to scale. I lead where you need leadership, stay hands-on where it matters, and work directly with Product, Engineering, and company leadership.
20+ years designing products and leading design
Experience across startups, enterprise, and everything in between.
Gibson Guitar · Adobe · Marketo · Upwork · T‑Mobile · Teamshares
I've worked inside large organizations, helped build early-stage products, and led design through the muddy parts where teams, products, and processes have to catch up with growth.
What I do
You don't always need a full-time Head of Design.
Sometimes you need someone senior enough to lead the function, experienced enough to see what's wrong, and hands-on enough to actually fix it. That's where I come in.
Lead
Set design direction, establish priorities, mentor designers, and give Product and Engineering a strong design partner.
Build
Create the systems, processes, rituals, and governance that allow design to scale without becoming bureaucracy.
Design
Stay close to the product. Research, flows, prototypes, interaction design, and production-ready UI when the work calls for it.
Scale
Help you hire, structure, and mature your design organization—or bridge the gap until you're ready for your next full-time leader.
WHO I HELP
Maybe you don't need more designers. You might need more design leadership.
You have designers, but no real direction.
I can provide the direction, mentorship, and decision-making your team is missing.
Your product has outgrown the way you design it.
I'll help establish the systems and processes needed to handle the next stage.
Product and Engineering are carrying too much of the design burden.
Especially in this age of AI and the velocity that comes with it, design needs to be in the conversation earlier and help make better design decisions together.
You need senior design help, but not five days a week.
Exactly what fractional leadership is made for.
You're building your first real design organization.
I'll help define the roles, processes, expectations, and systems you need before they become problems.
You're between design leaders.
I'll keep the team moving while you figure out the permanent structure.
How I work
Part-time leadership. Full-time commitment to the work.
I embed with your team rather than operating from the sidelines. I work directly with founders, Product, Engineering, and Design to understand what's getting in the way, establish priorities, and move the work forward.
Depending on what you need, that could mean
Design leadership
Direction, critique, team mentorship, hiring, and organizational structure.
Product strategy
Helping teams turn ambiguous problems into something they can actually build.
Design systems
Creating the foundations, standards, and governance that make quality repeatable.
Hands-on product design
Diving into the work when something needs design attention.
Interim leadership
Keeping the team moving when you're between design leaders or building your team.
01
Understand
02
Align
03
Build
04
Ship
05
Scale
DESIGN SYSTEMS & AI
Design systems aren't just component libraries.
They help determine how a design organization scales its decisions.
I help teams create the foundations, patterns, tokens, documentation, and governance that make good design easier to repeat—and make designers less dependent on constant review.
AI makes good teams faster. It doesn't replace good judgement.
I use AI throughout the design process to reduce repetitive work, explore ideas faster, prototype more quickly, and help teams turn design decisions into production-ready systems.
The goal isn't to make more design. It's to spend more time on the decisions that matter.
Let’s work together
Need design leadership? Let's talk.
Tell me where your team is today, what's getting in the way, and where you're trying to go. If I can help, we'll figure out what that looks like.