davidbean, back to the first slide

Brooklyn, NY · 2026

davidbean

A designer engineering. I research it, design it, then build it, so nothing gets lost in the handoff.

Co-founder of SNACKS. Before that, Principal Product Designer at Meta, Senior Interaction Designer at Bloomberg, and a decade of agency work. This is a deck, not a site. It runs on Snacks Slides, one of a suite of tools I built at SNACKS, and everything in it is a real thing you can use.

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01The loop

The loop between design and engineering used to take months. Now it takes minutes.

For most of my twenty-plus years, I designed something, handed it off, and waited weeks or months to see it built. By then the timing, the states, and the feel of it in your hand had drifted, and the next round started from a picture again.

Since 2025 I build what I design, with coding agents carrying the labor. A change I sketch in the morning is running by lunch, so I can test it, throw it out, and try again the same day. Not prototypes: products with accounts, app-store listings, billing, and users who complain. I bring engineers running code instead of a picture of it, and every conversation starts further along.

02The trip

Engineer, designer, manager, founder, IC. Now I’m back where I started, doing both.

Engineering
Design
Leading
  1. 2001 to 2011Designer and developerFreelance and small shops. I designed the sites, then built them.
  2. 2011EngineerOpenSky: a UI engineer on a live store. Prototyping in code, fast.
  3. OpenSky, laterDesignerInteraction design on the same team. The code came with me.
  4. 2014 to 2015Agency UXCode and Theory: the Huffington Post and Xfinity Mobile.
  5. 2015 to 2021Managing teamsDom & Tom, design lead to Director of UX. A team of six.
  6. 2019Starting a studioCo-founded SNACKS. Bloomberg, where I managed design, was client two.
  7. 2021 to 2024IC at MetaBrought the Bloomberg lessons, then learned scale: process, big orgs, many pods.
  8. 2024 to nowDesign and engineeringBack to SNACKS for a flexible life. Building what I design since 2025.
  9. NextA team to build withKeep building and experimenting with every new capability, alongside engineers.
03SNACKS · the studio Paul and I run

Then Paul and I started SNACKS. Small by design.

SNACKS is the studio Paul Petrowsky and I co-founded. Six senior people, each of us used to being the one in the room with nobody above to escalate to. We treat every layer of a business as a design problem: brand, product, ops, go-to-market, built with the same care by the same people.

Paul and I both spent years at Meta as Principal Product Designers, him on Central Integrity and Support, me on Central Privacy, Enterprise Tooling, and Developer Experiences. Before that, a dozen agency years each, some of them side by side. SNACKS puts both kinds of muscle to work in one place. Brooklyn and Chicago, Eastern time, mostly.

What follows is Snacks Labs: the products we built for ourselves, shipped in the open with the same care as client work. It starts with the one people play every day.

The studioSnacks Labs

  • DirectNo layers between you and the work. Most of what slows a studio down is internal; we skip all of it. Your point of contact is a person doing the work.
  • CompressedAI moves the speed. We move the standard. Cycles that took weeks take days, and a daily trivia game went from first sketch to two app stores and the web in seven weeks. Senior review on everything that ships; client work stays out of model training.
  • EmbeddedWe work within, not just with. Slack channels, standups, the messy middle. Not consultants delivering a deck. Partners shipping with you.
  • Three layersDesign, strategy, operations. Some of it is the six of us, some is a bench of senior specialists we have already shipped with. The standard is the same either way.
04Snacks Trivia · iOS, Android, web

We gave ourselves the brief. Figma to two app stores in seven weeks.

2 daysfirst playable web prototype
2 weekslive in the App Store
7 weeksfirst commit to public launch
332commits, one designer
3platforms, one backend

App StoreGoogle PlayWeb

  • The ruleEverything the app should be lived in living spec documents: product rules, database contracts, design tokens, a running decision log. Every session began by reading them.
  • Web firstIterate fast on a Next.js build, lock the behavior, then port the proven flows to Expo and React Native for the stores. One backend served both.
  • By subtractionIt started as a live, race-the-clock game, until we watched people fail to coordinate a thirty-second window. So: an async daily puzzle with hints that build tension. A clever auto-elimination mechanic tested as confusing, so it went.
  • FeedbackTwo months of friends and family before public launch, and still. Their reactions drive what changes next. AI builds the changes; it does not get to choose them.
  • My partDesigned and built by me, with coding agents. The product calls, the cuts, and the bugs I caught were mine; most of the keystrokes were not.
04Snacks Trivia · the same screen, three games

It got good by subtraction. Then it got designed down to every state.

v1 · liveRace the clock
Version one: a 30-second timer ring above a question with four answers

One question at noon and thirty seconds to answer, up to 1,500 points for speed, locked out on a wrong answer. People could not make the window.

v2 · asyncAll day, with hints
Version two: a question with a hint card, three hint dots, and eight answers

One question all day, eight answers, three hints that each cost points. Hints greyed out wrong answers on their own; that auto-elimination tested as confusing, so it went.

Shipped · every screenFewer answers, every state
The shipped daily question: a hint card, five answers, one wrong guess marked, and a tab bar

Five answers, hints you ask for, two points off per wrong guess. Then every state drawn before it was built: 39 for the daily question alone, before games, groups, the TV, and admin.

05Snacks Swirl · a daily paint game

Blue plus yellow has to make green. Concept to a refined live game in two days.

One named target color a day. Squeeze pigment, swirl it with your finger, and serve when it looks right. Trivia makes you think; Swirl is built to soothe.

  • WhySnacks is growing a suite of one-a-day games, and each one earns a different minute of your day. Trivia is the one that makes you think. Swirl was designed as a calming ritual to start the morning with: no clock, nothing to beat, one color to find.
  • Built for calmEvery feel decision serves that. Strokes glide along the rim instead of dying there, the paint has weight and gloss, and the phone hums under your finger. It should feel like stirring, not like scoring.
  • LearnedKids love it. They take to it quickly and excitedly, with no explanation needed. I did not design it for them, and it is the clearest signal yet that the calm is real.
  • Under itKubelka-Munk pigment mixing over six spectral bands, a WebGL2 paint field, and a server that recomputes every score from the pour weights, so no phone can lie.

Live. Long-press a tube to pour, then swirl with your finger or mouse. One serve a day; after that the palette is yours.

06Snacks Arcade · the games, together, and on the TV

The TV is the stage. Phones are the controllers. Eyes up.

Scan in: The TV shows a room code and a QR. Phones scan in with a name and a snack, no account.Scan the code and you are inA name and a snack, no account
Anyone starts: Whoever taps Start picks the topic, then the whole room counts in on the TV.Whoever starts picks the topicThe room counts in together
Eyes up: The question only ever appears on the TV. Phones get the five buttons.The question lives on the TVPhones get only the buttons
Locked in: Lock in and the phone tells you to look up. The TV shows who has answered.Locked in, eyes on the TVWho has answered
The reveal: The TV shows how the room split. Each phone shows only its own result.How the room splitYour result, on your phone only
The podium: Snacks rain on the winner. Play again keeps the same crew on the couch.The winner, and their snack raining downSame crew, next round

The live stage wants a TV. Open trivia.snacks.design/tv on a big screen and this phone becomes the controller.

  • Server-anchoredThe room row is the truth. Every client, the TV included, is a disposable view that can rehydrate. Any client may advance once the deadline passes, so a dead TV cannot stall the game and nobody can rush it.
  • Ten-foot typeBuilt for a Samsung’s Chromium 69, so the stage is its own conservative bundle served at /tv. Optional chaining alone is a parse error there.
  • Guests, no accountsA nickname and an emoji. Signed-in players keep their identity, one account across Trivia and Swirl. Questions come from recently minted packs, so a party costs nothing to generate.
  • NextThe Samsung app as a thin shell over the hosted stage, and Swirl’s TV version.
07Sites and Brains · the systems case

Two products that never share a database. One agent walks between them, through a door the size of a sentence.

Client websites, designed in Figma and edited inside slots.
the agent doora short list of verbs
What the studio knows: research, decisions, and money.
two agent seatsSarah and Little Paul
Where the team asks, and where the agents answer and draft.

Next: each piece, then three drawings of how they fit.

07Snacks Sites · a managed website platform

The product is the process. Designers ship templates in Figma; clients edit words, never structure.

The template: A designer names the editable layers in Figma. Everything else is locked.Layers named slot: become editable fieldsThe slots, outlined on the template itself
The client's home: Clients land on their own site, with three plain steps to a first change.Three steps, layout fixedEvery page and its status
Words, not structure: The page comes from the designer's Figma file. Clients fill the marked slots.Layout locked by designThe real page, live
Click to edit: Click any words on the page and the matching field opens, ready to edit.Pick it on the pageNo adding sections
Help with the words: Every field has AI help: try a new tone, or draft from a brief.Pick a tone or brief
Reviewed, then live: Edits go to a reviewer first, and every version can be brought back.Send it for reviewEvery change on record
Live on their domain: What ships is the designer's page, with the client's own words in it.The designed pageLive on their domain
  • Built inAbout two weeks for the working platform: Next.js, Neon Postgres, Clerk, Stripe, Netlify CI, a Figma webhook. Ten tenants publish through it.
  • IngestionPaste a repo and the platform works out what it is. An annotated hand-built site imports one template per page shape, with an AI pass that proposes the annotations as a draft PR for a human to review.
  • No lock-inOne button exports a standalone, client-owned repo with design, content, and images vendored in. Trust is easier to earn when leaving is easy.
  • My partDesigned and built by me, in about two weeks. The studio runs its client sites on it, and Little Paul can drive it from Slack, which is where this case is going.
07Snacks Brains · how a brain is made

Every project gets a brain. So does the studio.

Raw material Transcripts Sync notes Slack channel Design audit Video local models only Typed finding pain f_12 · chunk 7 quote = chars 118 to 190 of chunk 7 exact substring of its chunk checked on write, and again by a trigger leaves the machine scrub scrubbed before synthesis Synthesis Themescites f_12, f_31 Decisionscites f_12 Briefscites f_12, f_08 frontier models, scrubbed text only, zero citations fails returns to the machine restore names come back here Our team artifact generation A new engagement is a form in the app or a YAML file, never a code change.
  1. Raw materialTranscripts, sync notes, a Slack channel, design audits, video. Local models only.
  2. Typed findingKind, salience, and a quote that must be an exact substring of its chunk, checked on write and again by a trigger.
  3. ScrubEverything is scrubbed before synthesis; nothing leaves the machine with names on it.
  4. SynthesisFrontier models on scrubbed text only. Themes, decisions, and briefs each cite finding ids; zero citations fails.
  5. Back on the machineThe names come back client-side, and our team takes the cited result into artifact generation.
07Snacks Brains · every claim has a source

Every claim points at a sentence a real person said.

9,000+findings across 8 real projects
20pipeline stages, each resumable
92migrations
1,900+tests
9invariants, enforced in code

Try the verbatim gate

Interview, dispatch lead, 4 Mar. If I am honest, every dispatcher keeps a private spreadsheet of driver availability because the shared board is always a day behind. So we have six versions of the truth and none of them is the board. What we actually need is one screen that says who is free right now, and that we all trust. On the roadmap side, we agreed to hold the mobile app until the web board is solid, which nobody loved but everybody signed off on.
  • A brain per projectA synopsis, the work-order timeline, a decision board, and a chat that answers with citations. If a quote is not an exact substring of its source, the brain refuses to store it.
  • The company brainAbove the projects, finance only: the books from QuickBooks and the hours from Harvest, read-only by construction. What anyone is paid never enters a prompt.
  • Teach itType “remember:” in any chat and it becomes something the brain knows, labeled with who taught it. A listener reads every brain’s Drive and Slack every thirty minutes.
  • Cross-pollinationLearnings confirmed on one project ride onto the next. Insights stop dying with the project that produced them.
07Snacks Brains · the two agents

Two agents with faces and Slack seats. They draft. A person decides.

SarahThe studio’s assistant · the books
  • Backed figuresEvery figure has to appear in the lines its sentence cites, or the sentence is left out. Arithmetic is written as an expression and worked out in code.
  • Her own inboxShe drafts payment reminders in her Gmail on a cadence, to whoever Harvest sent each invoice to, reads the replies, and moves a promise to its date. A person presses send.
  • Thirteen weeksA cash schedule from the books, the bills, payroll, and Harvest, with the low week named and what happens if a client pays late.
  • Monday tipsShe reads the books from QuickBooks and the hours from Harvest, read-only, and raises a short list of tips, each with the why and the rows behind it. Dismiss one, and it returns only if the condition does.
# ask-sarah example books

David@Sarah how does cash look through January?

SarahIt holds through the year, then gets tight. Cash stays above our floor until the week of Dec 14 and bottoms out the week of Jan 11, after two payroll runs and the card. If Example Co pays two weeks late, the low comes a week sooner. I sent you the payroll detail in a DM.

Little PaulThe studio’s design agent · the audits
  • The gateHe proposes, a designer disposes. Nothing reaches a client until a designer accepts or sets aside each point, with a reason.
  • One questionHe asks Paul one question at a time in Slack, with the screen it is about attached, and asks for more only when Paul does.
  • Weekly reviewThe reasons designers give for setting points aside become proposed edits to the rubric, in the rubric’s own format. A person makes them.
# design-desk example audit

Little PaulOn the Example Co redesign, the contact page: the form asks for a phone number before it says what happens next. Is this worth doing? Say yes, no with why, or how much it would help and how much work it is.Contact · desktop · screen 1

Paulyes, big win, little work

Little PaulPlaced it: high impact, low effort, under your name. Four of nine decided on this audit.

07Sites and Brains · what the agents know

A model is clever. An agent has to know the business. So I gave them a world model they keep checking.

  • Evidencethe brainsEvery finding with its quote, the books’ rows, the hours. Each agent reads only what the person asking may read.
  • Memoryabout peopleWhat people say about themselves and each other, kept in their own words and correctable by them.
  • Teachingssaid on purpose“Remember:” in any chat, labeled taught and by whom. A new teaching flags the older claims it outdates.
  • Beliefsthe world modelTheir own inferences about the business: a fact, a pattern, a rule of thumb, an expectation. Each carries sure, fairly sure or a guess, and the rows it came from. No rows, no belief.
  • Outcomeschecked in codeWhen an agent says what will happen, it is written down and checked against what did. Patterns are recomputed weekly; a belief nothing confirms for ninety days fades.
  • Calibrationhow sure to soundThe hit rate behind each confidence word sets how sure they may sound. “I don’t know” is a full answer.
# ask-sarah example books

David@Sarah who should get the Example Co reminder?

SarahPretty sure it’s their accounts payable address, not the studio contact. That’s where the last three invoices went.

SarahI used to think they paid two weeks late. The last three were on time, so I’d guess the 20th.

  • NoticingOnce a morning each agent reads its world and raises at most three things the team would want to know first, each with its rows.
  • Second lookA hard question gets a draft, a critique and a revision before it posts. Anyone can say “quick” to skip it.
  • Built inFour days, decided on a Friday and live by Monday, slice by slice, each one checked by the coach.
07Sites and Brains · how it fits together

Read it bottom to top: sources, engine, brains, agents, people. Names stop at the dotted line.

PEOPLE Where the team works AGENTS Always on, each in its own seat on the studio Mac BRAINS What it knows, stored in Supabase, locked row by row ENGINE How it learns, all on the studio Mac SOURCES What it reads Slack Rooms and DMs Brains app Chat on every page Gmail Sarah's mail, in and out GitHub The coach's fixes QUESTIONS IN, ANSWERS, DRAFTS AND FIXES OUT Sarah Virtual CFO GPT-OSS · FINANCE ONLY COACH The coach Watches the two OPUS 5.5 · EVERY HOUR Little Paul The design desk GPT-OSS 120B · OPUS 5.5 turns notes turns notes Company brain Books, hours, cash, tips FINANCE ONLY Project brains Findings, themes, decisions ONE PER ENGAGEMENT Design desk Audits, Figma frames, taste SCORED AGAINST TASTE reads every project reads The engine STUDIO MAC · M5 MAX, 128 GB Read Find Scrub names Match Make sense Learn Local models: qwen3.8 27B reads · gpt-oss 120B speaks · nomic-embed matches · Whisper listens The listener runs it when new material lands; the books sync every morning. writes writes writes Drive Slack rooms Meetings Figma Websites QuickBooks READ-ONLY Harvest READ-ONLY pulled in OUTSIDE THE STUDIO MAC Snacks Slides Decks open from a link decks Snacks Sites Where sites are made and published NETLIFY · NEON · CLERK agent door status Vercel Hosts the Brains app Supabase Holds the brains; Google sign-in NAMES STOP HERE Claude in the cloud Opus 5.5: themes, briefs, critiques Sonnet 5.5: money recaps Haiku 5.5: public reviews ANTHROPIC scrubbed themes AS OF 2 NOV 2026

Every agent answers only from what the asker may read. The engine reads on one Mac; only scrubbed words cross to Claude, and the names come back in the browser of someone allowed to see them. Snacks Sites sits outside, reached through its agent door.

08Snacks Slides · decks that are websites

Every deck is a URL. You are inside one right now.

546lines in the first engine
3copies of one engine, kept honest by a parity test
1deck you are reading

A small Slides editor drops in from the top. Every word on this slide is editable, and it changes here as you type.

  • Slots, not a blank canvasTemplates protect the design the way slots do in Snacks Sites. The guardrails are the product.
  • Faithful importA .pptx comes in as the canvas its author made, never forced into a template. If a slide cannot be made faithful, it says so and imports it anyway.
  • Own the deckStudio and client decks publish git-backed, so a deck is a repo the client can keep.
  • Try itRewrite anything on this slide: press Edit this slide. Press F to present, hover the bottom edge for the map, and print for one slide per sheet.
09The syllabus · two suites, not one-offs

I build suites, not one-offs. Half are the studio’s own tools; half are the Snacks Arcade.

Studio tools · how SNACKS runs

  • Snacks Brainsthe memory, the moneyA Python pipeline, local models on Apple silicon, PII scrubbing, database triggers as invariants. Then QuickBooks and Harvest, launchd agents, and how a small studio’s books actually behave.
  • Snacks Sitesthe platformMulti-tenancy, Postgres with Drizzle, Stripe, Clerk, a Figma webhook, and the idea that guardrails are architecture, not guidelines.
  • Snacks Slidesthe tool for thisDecks as data, faithful .pptx import, and a parity test that keeps three copies of an engine honest.

The Snacks Arcade · one account, a game a day

  • Snacks Triviathe store, the plumbingExpo and React Native, push notifications, store review, a server that generates and moderates questions, and the lesson that a game gets good by subtraction.
  • Snacks Swirlthe physicsWebGL2 shaders, Kubelka-Munk pigment mixing, OKLab scoring, web haptics, and a server that referees from the recipe, never the pixels.
  • Snacks Arcadethe roomRealtime broadcast, server-anchored rooms, a television’s old Chromium, and ten-foot type.

Both suites share one design system, one account, and one brain reading across them.

10Meta · Principal Product Designer, 2021 to 2024

I went to Meta to learn how things scale. Privacy was scaling faster than anything.

  • What I broughtDesign speed as a way to run the room. When legal, engineering, and program teams disagreed, I brought something concrete to the next conversation, and the debate turned into decisions.
  • SystemsThe biggest systems work of my career. Every new law touched dozens of teams, so I mapped one path for all of them: legal review, a proposal, a compliance roadmap, approval, then the engineering work and privacy review. The next regulation plugged into that path instead of getting its own tool, and an executive could open any regulation and see the releases it touched.
  • What I madeInternal tools, forms, dashboards, process maps, and research. The regulatory review is reconstructed in the prototype under the meeting: real regulations, invented people and decisions.
  • LabsThe first Llama in the privacy org read new regulations and suggested what mattered. Nobody trusted a synthesis yet, so the model had to show its work: every suggestion sat beside the exact text with its reasoning and its confidence, and a person accepted each one. That is what earned the trust. The thread continues in Snacks Brains, earlier in this deck.
  • TeamsCentral Privacy, Enterprise Tooling, Developer Experiences, Privacy AI and Automation.
Big SurMeeting 12 minDecisions 0

11The resume

More than twenty years of the first half of the sentence. Then the second half.

  • SNACKS, Co-founder2019 onward, and a design-engineering studio since 2025: client work and our own products, shipped with coding agents. Snacks Brains, Trivia, Swirl, the Arcade, Sites, and Slides, all on the slides before this one.
  • Meta, Principal Product Designer2021 to 2024. Privacy tooling and the cross-team workflows behind regulatory response. The chapter on the previous slide.
  • Bloomberg, Senior Interaction Designer2020 to 2021. Enterprise tooling and developer experience in a dense, keyboard-first world.
  • Dom & Tom, Director of UX2015 to 2021, from design lead to running a team of six. Built the UX practice and its process; proudest of every designer I hired and mentored. Along the way I worked on the first app for Gemini, the crypto exchange.
  • Code and Theory, Senior UX Designer2014 to 2015. The Huffington Post redesign, and service design for the launch of Xfinity Mobile alongside Comcast and IDEO.
  • OpenSky, UI Engineer, then Interaction Designer2011 to 2013. The chapter this whole deck rhymes with.

Also true

Two gold and one silver Addy, a silver Davey. Certified ScrumMaster. Hunter College, photography. Clients along the way: Bloomberg, Meta, Huffington Post, Xfinity Mobile, BMW, Comcast, Dick’s Sporting Goods, NYU, General Electric, CNN, Gemini, Chase.

What I want next

A senior individual-contributor role on a team shipping real products to real people, where I keep designing and keep building with the engineering reach AI has put in a designer’s hands. New York, or a team that does not mind where I sit.

Resume, PDFThe long version is on LinkedIn

12What matters to me

Pushing the discussion forward means exploring possibilities. Exploring possibilities means solving more problems than you meant to.

ExplorationTry the thing. It is cheap now.
InventionWhen the tool you need does not exist, build it.
CollaborationYou can only go so far on your own. Teamwork is most of my career.
EducationTeaching a thing is how I find out whether I understand it.
Good peopleThe best team I ever worked with did not feel like work. I keep looking for that.
13Thanks for getting this far

Say hi: hi@david.design

LinkedIn GitHub SNACKS Resume

This deck is hand-built: static HTML, a deck engine I wrote, a canvas game, and two small serverless functions. More of my work is on GitHub. Press P to print one slide per page.