Hiya! I'm Brian Fling. I lead design and product teams, advise startups, and teach others how to make beautifully designed software that improves people's lives. I make bagels too 🥯
The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and its AI-first startup incubator were created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. I was the Head of Design for our portfolio of AI-first companies who raised over $56M on $250M valuation during my tenure.
Amazon Ads accounts for $31.6B in revenue for Amazon – making it the second largest online advertiser after Google. I led the reimagining of the advertiser platform – from customer journeys, to product strategy, to creation of a new modernized design system.
Roxy is a speech enabled device that provides curated and personalized in-room concierge services from the team that previously worked on Amazon Alexa. Roxy was designed from the beginning to directly address the limitations of consumer-facing speech enabled devices, like context and complex requests.
Roxy was acquired by Angie Hospitality in 2019.
Catalytic’s AI-powered automation SaaS platform bridges the gap between people, data and existing technologies, providing configurable automated actions that replace routine work. I led the design of the core platform, the super-simple automation builder and our customer education tools.
Catalytic was acquired by PagerDuty in 2022.
Toks – part of Grupo Gigante – is one of Mexico's largest and most popular restaurant chains, serving over 33 million customers per year. In partnership with our friends at Deloitte Digital, I led the C-level folks from Toks and Grupo Gigante through a series of design thinking workshops, research and strategy sessions to develop a digital transformation program to reinvent the lunch experience in Mexico.
I led the design of a one-of-a-kind program that used autonomous forklifts to move scissor lifts around a work site. The autonomous forklift generates a realtime map with onboard LiDAR. Users design and run forklifts routines from an iPad. It was pretty dope.
The BBC iPlayer for iPad (Global Edition) was more than just a mouthful, it was an instant Top 10 app around the world – with 1M+ downloads in the first year (without the US or UK 😢). I led the design team of this award winning app that providing the best of the BBC like Doctor Who, Sherlock, The Office, AbFab and more.
It's practically legend now, but I once brought together and led the worlds best designers to help get HSBC (the worlds largest bank) unstuck – in one week. Our work and expertise had an enormous impact on HSBCs 40M+ customers, dramatically improving both account opening and customer satisfaction. The new information architecture and design language we created that week became the foundation of HSBCs digital strategy that continues today.
I led the global mobile and tablet programs for the world's largest bank for several years. I led multiple creative and engineering programs, like the global design system standards, as well as managed design teams and partner agencies located in London, Hong Kong, New York and Seattle.
I produce and co-host a podcast that discusses the day-to-day challenges of “the least important, most important job there is” – being a designer!
Not many people get to say they "wrote the book" on a topic. I was very fortunate to invited to write the very first O'Reilly "animal" book – often seen as the definitive guide – on mobile design. I haven't had the time to update it in years, though it is still being used in university-level courses to teach Mobile Design. One day, I will bring it up to date.
