I’m James Dixon, a design leader with 13+ years in product design and 7+ of them managing designers. I lead design for GoDaddy’s in-person selling: the point-of-sale devices, mobile apps and web tools businesses use to get paid in person, whether that’s a shop counter, a dental office or a booth at a county fair. I’ve led globally distributed teams remotely since 2019, from the Denver area, where I live with my family.
How I got here
I started as a designer in the Bay Area, first doing web and growth design at Hightail (then YouSendIt), then at CBS Interactive and LinkedIn, where I worked on core product experiences used by hundreds of millions of members. LinkedIn was the first place I saw UX treated as a first-class part of the business, with the structure, process and standing to match. It showed me what design can do when the organization around it is built right.
Then I moved to Colorado and started building that kind of organization myself. At BiggerPockets, I was the first product designer, built the product design function, and helped hire the designers who followed. At GoSpotCheck, I moved from designer to manager, built the team’s design system and its component library, and designed a mobile product with machine learning and computer vision in 2018, my first taste of designing with AI.
Most of my career since has been joining teams where design needed building or rebuilding. At VMware Carbon Black, I led a team of designers through the VMware integration and built design into a product lifecycle where it had been absent. At HubSpot, I led UX for the CRM data model every HubSpot hub runs on, and led the vision that set the group’s direction. At GoDaddy, I grew the team from 3 to 7 designers, reorganized it around the merchant’s journey, set the UX direction for a voice-led setup agent on our terminals, and made AI part of how we work.
What ties it together
I like problems where the system is the product. CRM data models, enterprise security, point-of-sale hardware: in each, the hard part isn’t one screen, it’s how everything connects. The same is true of design teams. I bring the habits I’d use on any design problem to leading people: listen first, understand the environment, then design for it. How I lead says more.
AI is the biggest change to both right now. In products, I think it should remove the customer’s work, not add features. In teams, it’s changing what one designer can explore in a day. It’s where I’m spending most of my attention.
Outside work
I spend as much time outside as I can. Mountain biking on the Front Range, camping, hiking and soccer, and time with my family and our dog.