Peter Bartsch

Founder · Product Design & Engineering

Open-source modular structures. I'm the only designer, and I use AI to do the engineering. One source of truth feeds six surfaces.

• Shipped Thios v1.0 solo: full product line, live storefront, first revenue in.
• Built the parametric Onshape CAD that everything else runs off. It drives the BOM and the 3D configurator at thios.co/configurator, where customers configure real geometry pulled straight from the CAD. I designed every state it can be in: valid and invalid combinations, loading, errors, empty, BOM hand-off.
• Built a design system that spans six surfaces off one source of truth. DESIGN.md is the spine, and the design tokens under it are the named values for color, type and spacing everything else reads from. CSS, live docs, Figma and the Onshape CAD all follow the same source, and agent-driven audits keep them honest. I published the audit as a Claude Skill (audit-design-token-drift) that flags token drift with file:line citations. It's built as developer tooling: thios.co/design-system-architecture.html

Senior Lead UX, Digital Customer Experience

I sat with the product teams and modernized 20-year-old systems so Deere could sell connected services on its ag equipment.

• Redesigned license management for Deere's Automation and AI services, used by 500K+ customers. I mapped every state a license can be in: expired, renewed, transferred, dealer-managed. Nothing got simple until that did. This flow gates Deere's $3.8B connected-services business.
• Took profile completion from 34% to 87%. The mandate was “make them fill it out.” I made it worth filling out instead.
• Cut design-to-development handoff time about 45% on the nav components that shipped. I built the first dev-ready tokens, prop specs and full state coverage for Deere's enterprise design system in Figma, used by 6 brands and 40+ product teams. Then I pitched the system strategy to VPs, along with the governance model that says who owns a change and how it gets approved, to get cross-brand adoption.
• Built one account and navigation framework for 8 product lines across web, mobile and embedded equipment. Eight ways in became one.

Lead UX / Manager

Founding design hire, employee #28. The company went from $3M to $100M in annual recurring revenue while I was there. I built the design team and helped the founders shape the roadmap.

• Built FourKites' first design system, covering every web and mobile product. A component library plus a design-to-dev pipeline in Sketch, Zeplin and Storybook cut one-off component variants 65%. I ran design ops for a team split between Chicago and Chennai.
• Designed the flagship IoT asset-tracking platform 0→1. A real-time supply chain control tower on web, plus mobile apps handling GPS and telematics events for 30+ Fortune 500 customers. Anheuser-Busch, Georgia-Pacific, Cargill, Tyson.
• Led the predictive analytics dashboards: data viz, anomaly states, alerting workflows. They flagged shipment delays 6–12 hours before a traditional ETA would. Over that same stretch, customer retention rose 38% year over year. What I owned was the confidence-level UI, showing people how sure the data was so they'd trust it enough to act on it.
• Drivers were being tracked and getting nothing for it. I built incentives into the app instead, and driver app retention went up 53%.

Senior UX + Agile Lead

Led digital product design for enterprise healthcare and pharma clients. Fast iteration in slow-moving industries.

• Designed 6 portals for AbbVie, used by 200K+ employees, clinical-trial staff and patients across trial and patient-support programs. Better adherence tracking came out of it.
• Rebuilt the pharmacy formulary platform for OptumRx, then built OptumRx's first patient-facing product. Fulfillment errors from drug interactions dropped 15%.
• Established Lean UX and Agile practices across client engagements, mentored junior designers, and ran the design sprints

Product Marketing Manager, HERE Traffic

Product work across real-time vehicle-telematics data products and an open-source distributed computing project (DEMPSY, a Hadoop alternative).

• Designed GPS probe visualizations and a probe viewer app for real-time connected-vehicle telematics analysis
• Wireframed and led project delivery for HERE Real-Time Traffic and Trapster app integrations across connected-vehicle data products
• Owned go-to-market for DEMPSY, an open-source distributed computing platform, with early exposure to designing for developer audiences

Product Manager, Signature Services

Aerospace connectivity: launched in-flight internet across major US airlines: onboard hardware + Air-to-Ground RF network.

• Owned airborne products and onboard hardware UX for major US airlines, including initial rollout testing across fleets
• Authored FAA-approved documentation for business and commercial fleet Air-to-Ground (ATG) RF connectivity systems
• Cross-team PM across airline portals, their mobile apps, and the onboard video service
• Conceived and owned an in-flight flight tracker 0→1 (real-time positional data + passenger UX) that drove successful sponsorship deals