HOLDEN HAYS
I'm a designer at heart, taking problems and breaking them down into solvable pieces. I use my powers for business, aligning company goals with customer needs to deliver great product experiences.
My background is in product design. My current focus is leading product design, marketing, and building AI workflows at Emerge, and creator of Fretlings.
DOWNLOAD RESUME ↓Experience
Director of Marketing and Design
Jul 2024 – Present · ~2 yrs
Scottsdale, Arizona
Leading product design and marketing strategy across Emerge's platform. Responsible for brand, go-to-market, and building AI-native workflows into how the team ships and operates.
Group Lead Product Designer
Feb 2022 – Jul 2024 · 2.5 yrs
Scottsdale, Arizona
Led design across multiple product lines, establishing design systems and patterns that unified the experience across Emerge's suite of freight tools.
Manager of Product Department
Sep 2021 – Feb 2022 · 6 mos
Phoenix, Arizona
Managed the product team and owned the process from discovery to delivery. Improved how features were scoped and prioritized to better align with business and customer goals.
User Experience Designer
Nov 2019 – Sep 2021 · 2 yrs
Phoenix, Arizona
Lead designer for Fullbay's shop management platform. Drove UX decisions across core workflows used by heavy-duty repair shops nationwide.
Lead Designer
2018 – Nov 2019
Scottsdale, Arizona
Redesigned the Hypur Platform across payment processing, CRM, document management, and analytics modules. Built UI kits and interaction patterns from scratch, and improved onboarding UX based on user feedback. Also owned the full marketing creative output — brand assets, iconography, illustration, and all motion and video content for training and campaigns.
Senior Patient Experience Designer
2017 – 2018 · 1 yr
Tempe, Arizona
Led a full UX overhaul of the patient acquisition funnel — new app, improved onboarding, and email engagement flows. Balanced user-centered design with MVP constraints to hit KPIs set by the business development team. Managed junior designers.
Senior Graphic Designer
2016 – 2017 · 1 yr
Tempe, Arizona
Created marketing and patient acquisition materials across print and digital. Managed the website UX to improve study enrollment, maintained brand standards with clients, and mentored junior designers.
Creative Trainer / Technical Support / Sales
2011 – 2016
Greater Phoenix Area
Supported customers with technical troubleshooting and trained them on creative software. Five years of daily hands-on interaction with iOS and macOS gave me an early foundation in how real people experience software — and what breaks their trust in it. Consistently achieved high customer satisfaction ratings.