Kyle Cyree

About

Note: I split my time between North Carolina and El Salvador, but am mostly based in El Salvador where I volunteer to help with economic development and Bitcoin adoption. In terms of how I like to work/think/engage, I tend to align myself more with intrigues and interests than specific companies or groups. Here are a few subjects I care about, along with a brief description.\n\nLiberty: I am an enormous supporter of individual liberty and a consummate believer in local markets, engagement, and involvement. I have worked with at-risk youth since 2002, at-risk startups since 2010, and at-risk liberty since 1986 (when I was born). My principal focus is in creating platforms and processes that allow individuals to excel, and then getting out of their way so that they can exceed my expectations.\n\nDesign: Depending on how you qualify it, I've been in design for a max of 20 years. I started my first full-time job when I was 16 designing logos for embroidery at a Western store in Lubbock and a screen printers just west of town, designed handbills and mix tapes and concert experiences for 4-5 bands that I fronted as a singer/musician after that, created content and launched the writing lab at Texas Tech University by myself, launched an artist collective in downtown Boston with some amazing compadres, ran customer experience for Foodler (acqd by GrubHub), started my own businesses focused on CEX and UX, and I've been doing proper UX/UI design and testing since 2015 as a senior/lead. I tend to work with small teams and early stage projects and products, and I tend to work more heavily on the practice/system/implementation side of things. That being said, my previous boss (Ed Boudrot) described me as the definition of a polymath, and I am never shy about taking risks for exciting new ventures or failing at new, hard, exhilarating things.\n\nStrategy: Simply put: too many businesses spend too much time on how something could be built instead of why we should build something/anything today. I believe that it's much better to toss some ideas out, get some feedback, and iterate through design before wasting developer's time and the business' money, and I try to make that happen as often as I can. I've implemented this practice in startups, agencies, intrapraneurship, consulting engagements, and in several enterprises. It can be summed up by paraphrasing DL Moody: I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it.

Experience

• Founder · Colon Hyphen Bracket09-01-2024 –

  I'm the founder of :-], a co-operative that helps make the digital/abstract into delightful, user-centered products. Our current major product efforts are in AI, content curation, grassroots eCommerce, and Bitcoin education and acquisition + managing our treasury on a Bitcoin standard. We build at the intersection of data transfer protocols, IAM, UX, AI, and Bitcoin. In this role, I am doing everything that a business requires: writing code, shipping product, marketing, design, content creation, brand, etc. We have taken no outside funding and I am currently investing in our products as the only angel investor.

• Lead Designer · Custodia Bank09-01-2023 – 09-01-2024

  In addition to working all verticals in the design stack, I'm also leading our marketing efforts and play a principal role in our future product R&D.

• Senior UX Designer · Custodia Bank01-01-2022 – 09-01-2024

  I have the great honor of spinning up the design team for Custodia as our design unicorn. Responsible for the rebrand, product strategy, design and interaction systems, visual design, UX/UI production and delivery, & PM-support into the implementation pipeline. Designing outreach, complegal, fiat banking, Bitcoin Custody for institutions, development and deployment of our digital cashier's check, prime services, and other business priorities as they emerge.

• Senior UX/UI Designer · Predictive UX10-01-2021 – 10-01-2022

  Freelancer supporting PUX's initiatives and clients. Led design for a large retailer account effecting millions of personnel and extremely complex/global systems utilizing knowledge graphs to deliver appropriately served content and actionable UI that aligns to major business outcomes, with decision impact in the $100k to $100m per decision.

• Senior Product Experience Designer · Optum01-01-2021 – 10-01-2021

  We recently shifted under UHG and I now work within OptumLabs, a R&D arm of UHG more broadly.

• Senior Product Experience Designer | Fusion - Enterprise Accelerator · Optum07-01-2020 – 10-01-2021

  Fusion is an enterprise accelerator within Optum that works with all lines of business across UnitedHealth Group. We co-create with teams by turning healthcare problems into opportunities in order to improve the lives of the members we serve. Using business and design methodologies, we step into the shoes of our users and conduct ethnographic research, synthesize that information into useable insights, and leverage them in a think tank-like environment full of experts to develop the best actionable solution.

• UX Design Director · BLDG-25, Inc.08-01-2019 – 07-01-2020

  Design lead for E2E design and development efforts, working across product development cycles within Fortune 500s to startups. Managed a team of a few other awesome designers and did my best to stay out of their way.

• Senior Interaction Designer · BLDG-25, Inc.07-01-2018 – 08-01-2019

  We're an Agile shop and I'm currently placed in-house at Fidelity (Charitable) working on some pretty neat stuff for the next year or two. I perform normal (but still so very cool!) design duties including Thinking and Rapid Prototyping, and in the off-chance event where I have a lot of free time, I'm dabbling in animation and "new"interaction modalities.

• Principal Web Designer · Fidelity Investments07-01-2018 – 12-01-2019

  I’m embedded at Fidelity NC with some of the BLDG-25 team.

• Strategy Consultant · LitePal02-01-2018 – 06-01-2018

  I'm currently volunteering part-time as a marketing consultant with LitePal, a payment processor supporting Bitcoin and Litecoin. At LitePal, I am strategically positioning their initial product launch and performing some SMM coaching. Over time, I will likely spend some time refining their web UI as we solicit, gather, and incorporate user feedback. The brand is being repositioned, so may be temporarily unsearchable online.

Education

• The University of North Carolina at Chapel HillMaster of Business Administration (MBA), Financial Accounting & Business Strategy
• Emerson CollegeMaster of Fine Arts, Storytelling
• Texas Tech UniversityBachelor of Arts, Honors Studies in English

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