I build the teams, frameworks, and products that scale.
I lead product strategy and design inside companies where the roadmap is full and the hard part is choosing. I work backend-first, so I know what's actually hard versus what only sounds hard. Engineering builds the right thing the first time, and design ships against a real spec instead of a guess.
Currently fractional Head of Design for an applied AI platform serving analysts in intelligence and insurance, where people act on automated output under time pressure. Previously Pinterest, Meta, Opendoor, and CNN. MBA in applied AI.
Work
The standard four teams shipped against.
Performance+ made automation something advertisers could trust.
Signals, not constraints.
Advertisers were asking for controls that would have broken the automation that was working.
The navigation advertisers stopped working around.
Eight organizations, one ads platform, and advertisers routing around its navigation.
The blueprint the organization reshaped around.
Launch was solved. The day after launch was not.
Three platforms became one.
Targeting had to get smarter while learning less.
The framework any team could ship with.
Automated ad-delivery advice only works if advertisers listen. They had learned to ignore it.
Practice & Ventures
Bayesian Leaf
My product and design practice for companies building with AI, where I sharpened a point of view: the problem is rarely design, it's decision infrastructure. These days that means fractional Head of Design for an applied AI platform serving analysts in intelligence and insurance. The practice site also runs a short diagnostic: six questions about how a team decides, then a straight read on where it breaks.
Chronicles of Sage Orange In open beta
An audio drama about time travelers, built on an AI narrative system I designed end to end: it verifies real historical facts, then feeds a narrative and character-relationship engine so every adventure recalls the last. Built solo: TypeScript, fifty-one production releases, with canon versioned semantically the way software is.
Presence In closed beta
Rule-based location sharing for close friends. No tracking, no broadcasting. We all get caught up in our routines, in whatever is in front of us. I wanted something that could nudge us to come up for air at the right time, when it matters, when it is our people. Presence quietly lets a welcomed person know when you are nearby and open to company. Built solo in SwiftUI: 234 source files.
Endorsements
“Always 3 steps ahead, Hew is a true mastermind and strategic connector who innately identifies gaps, opportunities and patterns across a product.”
“Formally titled a designer, but constantly acting as a little bit of everything: a strategic researcher, a technologist, a product manager.”
“Hew's willingness to challenge the status quo and advocate for solutions more durable and representative of customer needs stood out. The framework he outlined, and leading that discussion across teams, led to more structured conversations about the future of the platform.”
“Influencing roadmaps with the optimal set up framework, it's difficult not to feel the impact you've had. You've become a leader that our cross-functional partners want in the room.”
Reviews on LinkedIn, ADPList, and IGotAnOffer. Internal quotes from Pinterest review cycles.
Writing
Essays on decision infrastructure and building AI-native products.
Read moreWhat nearly two decades of platform research taught me about trust in automated systems.
About
Hew Suber
I'm a child of journalists, so I grew up in and out of newsrooms. A newsroom does one thing: it takes something complicated and makes it usable to somebody who has to act on it. That is what I have done for seventeen years. The ad platforms at Meta and Pinterest, the operations behind Opendoor, mobile news at CNN.
I build the things that outlast me. Frameworks other teams chose to build against, at Meta and again at Pinterest, the second written before it had a mandate. A governance process that still decides what ships at a company I left. The leveling framework a growing design team will hire against. A designer who now leads a product line of their own. I write code, because a picture of a thing will not tell you whether it works, and I lead to make a team faster rather than more dependent on me.
Design got me to the room. The MBA gave me the language for what happens in it.
Bring me the messy version. It's usually the part I like best.