Julio Gonzalez
Senior Product Designer | AI-native products, consumer mobile, and product growth | San Francisco, CA
Summary
I've built my career around finding product opportunities that unlock growth. That has meant modernizing a legacy American Express mobile app serving more than 20 million customers worldwide, shaping new B2B merchant experiences at Amazon, and helping define early-stage analytics and AI products at Google. Across very different products and audiences, I've consistently looked for the gaps between what a product can do and the value people actually get from it, then used design to close that gap and increase adoption and engagement.
Before product design, I spent a decade in Robert Longo's fine-art studio, an experience that gave me a deep foundation in visual craft, composition, and detail. More recently, I've been building my own iOS music discovery app with an AI-assisted design and development process, moving between product strategy, interaction design, visual design, and code to test ideas directly in working software.
Experience
Cthru Music Player
Founder & Builder | Jan 2026 - Present | San Francisco
- Founded, designed, and built a native iOS music discovery app now in TestFlight beta, with Apple Music playback, authentication, social sharing, and Supabase-backed recommendations.
- Created a social discovery model that lets listeners explore music through another person's taste, supported by personalized stations, privacy controls, and a dynamic visual system tied to album artwork.
- Used working software as the design medium, moving continuously between product definition, interaction design, implementation, and testing while building source-of-truth and verification workflows to keep AI coding agents aligned with product intent.
Google, AI for Cloud Business Intelligence
Senior Product Designer | Jan 2024 - Dec 2025 | San Francisco
- Initiated and led a system-wide remodel of BigQuery Data Canvas that made complex analyses easier to navigate, revisit, and share. The user base grew 36% in the three months following the final release.
- Turned an engineering prototype into Canvas Assistant, preserving editable SQL and analysis steps instead of hiding the work in chat. Queries run increased 30% after launch.
- Designed the author-and-test loop for BigQuery data agents across three engineering and two product teams. Structured context improved agent accuracy by 10% to 20% in early evaluations.
- Created human-review, draft, and publishing patterns for AI-generated context, partnering with the Cloud Design System team to make inline suggestion review reusable beyond BigQuery.
Amazon, Buy with Prime
User Experience Designer | Sep 2022 - Nov 2023 | San Francisco
- Designed growth, pricing, and account-management experiences for Buy with Prime, an early-stage merchant product operating like a startup inside Amazon.
- Redesigned the Klaviyo connection for automated checkout emails, replacing a manual technical setup with a deeplink that generated the API key and increasing journey completion from 25% to 100% in testing.
- Reframed Buy with Prime's pricing calculator around faster cost comparison, using competitor research and sales interviews to introduce prefilled product examples while preserving detailed manual inputs.
American Express, Enterprise Mobile
Lead Product Designer | Jan 2019 - Aug 2022 | New York
- Led Search, Chat, Benefits, and Loyalty for the Amex consumer mobile app, serving 20M monthly active users across 20 markets on iOS and Android.
- Expanded a one-tap enrollment request into a broader Offers browsing strategy. Mobile offer enrollments increased 533% year over year following the first release.
- Kept a major Membership redesign moving through product and design turnover, using behavioral data and customer research to refocus the experience around benefits. Tab retention increased 23% in the first three months.
- Led app-wide Search from early vision through beta and production experiments, increasing servicing journey completion 5% and reducing app-first calls 6%.
- Contributed to a mobile design system used by 20 designers and about 60 engineers, creating patterns for data visualization, input fields, maps, motion, and semantic color.
- Helped launch dark mode, reaching 40% adoption in the first month, and established design QA and monthly usability testing with high-fidelity prototypes.
American Express, Data & Analytics
UX/UI Designer | Mar 2018 - Dec 2018 | New York
- Designed internal data analysis tools for a big data platform, including data library search, extract-transform-load workflows, and CRM surfaces.
Robert Longo Studio
Studio Assistant | Feb 2006 - Nov 2017 | New York
- Led teams of artists producing large-scale charcoal drawings for major galleries and museums, building a foundation in visual craft, precision, and creative collaboration.
Education
General Assembly
UX Design Immersive Certificate | 2017 | New York
Rhode Island School of Design
BFA, Film, Animation, and Video | 2005 | Providence
Skills & Tools
Product Design: UX Design, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Information Architecture, Design Systems, Mobile Design, AI Product Design, Growth Design
Research & Strategy: Product Discovery, Usability Testing, Journey Mapping, Product Strategy, Cross-functional Collaboration, Experimentation
Prototyping & Build: AI-assisted Prototyping, Rapid Prototyping, Design-to-Code Workflows, Interaction Specification, Design QA
Tools: Figma, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, ProtoPie, Adobe Creative Cloud