Bethany McLellan — Product Design Leader for AI and Enterprise Systems

I design trust between humans and agentic systems — and build the strategy and systems that empower design teams to do their best work at scale.

I am currently Director of User Experience at NielsenIQ, where I lead AI product design, research strategy, and design systems across a 12-product enterprise suite serving 40,000+ users in 71 countries, and lead a 30-person design and research organization across 8 countries.

Selected work

Designing trustworthy enterprise AI at scale

Problem: How do you design autonomous and agentic systems that enterprise users will trust when their businesses are on the line?

Role: Global platform lead — AI UX vision, research strategy, and design sprints.

Scale: AI trust layer for an enterprise platform with 40,000+ users in 71 countries; 35 participants across two research studies.

Outcome: Four shipped trust surfaces — model confidence, knowledge gaps, reasoning exposure, and human-in-the-loop handoffs — and a trust-layer strategy adopted across the AI product portfolio.

Design systems as enterprise infrastructure

Problem: A three-month rebrand exposed years of front-end debt and a design system that existed only as scattered Figma frames.

Role: Design-system owner, Senior Designer through Director of User Experience; governance and succession.

Scale: Grew from one to five product verticals across a 12-product enterprise suite, built with a federated team and Common UI Engineering.

Outcome: Semantic tokens, a coded Angular component library, federated governance, and an AI-ready foundation — designers now ship component changes in code.

Overhauling a merged design team's operating model

Problem: A post-merger design organization needed career clarity, manager rituals, and AI fluency to set its own agenda.

Role: Director of User Experience; people manager and design-org leader.

Scale: 30-person design and research org across 8 countries; 15 direct reports plus design managers.

Outcome: Team engagement up 25 percentile points in one year, three designers promoted into lead roles, and an AI enablement program adopted by the wider product organization.

Writing

Essays on AI, design practice, and human judgment — read the writing index or the newsletter How to be Human (In the Age of AI).

Contact

Email Bethany McLellan · Bethany McLellan on LinkedIn · Download resume (Word document)