Christian Crumlish
Christian Crumlish (xian) is the founder of Design in Product, an independent consulting practice for fractional product leadership in the agentic era. He’s currently building Piper Morgan, an AI product-management assistant, and Klatch, a local-first Claude conversation manager. He was previously Director of Product Management at 18F (GSA), and before that Deputy Director of Service Innovation at California’s Office of Data and Innovation. Earlier in his career he was VP of Product at 7 Cups, winner of the 2016 Stanford Medicine X Prize for health systems design and the 2019 World Economic Forum Pioneer award, and Director of Product at CloudOn (acquired by Dropbox). He’s the author of Product Management for UX People (Rosenfeld Media) and co-author of Designing Social Interfaces. Christian lives in Palo Alto with his wife, Briggs, and an ever-growing collection of ukuleles.
Presentations
Leadership By Design 2026
Hilarious Tales of Failure: What a Year of Building With AI Taught Me
None of us feel like experts right now, and the loudest voices online are making that worse. I want to fix that for 30 minutes.
A year ago I started building an AI product-management assistant, mostly to teach myself what these tools could actually do. It’s been genuinely messy: agents that confidently reported things that weren’t true, a scheduled job that died silently through a server reboot, a “fix” that looked more precise and quietly made things worse. I’ll walk through the real failures, not the highlight reel, and the one principle that’s kept the whole thing usable through all of it: the human has to own the loop, not just be somewhere inside it.
If you’ve felt behind on AI, or suspicious of everyone who claims they’re not, this talk is for you. Bring your hands. We’re getting them dirty.
UX Camp Spring 2022
Product Management for UX People
“Why is a product Manager telling me what to do?” “Plus, how is software even a product?” “What do product managers want and why are they so frustrating?” Have you ever asked yourself any of these questions? Meet product managers where they live. They make decisions all day long. They don’t get to say “it depends.” Most of the time they don’t actually make the decision—they just make sure it gets made right. They have to keep the build, measure, learn cycle. They have to cajole engineers. They have to persuade stakeholders to support a focused roadmap. Have some sympathy for the PM.
I feel your pain. It can be a struggle to influence product direction (before it’s too late). It’s not easy to coax requirements out of PM partners. Presenting design & research work can feel like speaking a different language. How product managers generally prioritize initiatives can be opaque. These pain points are widespread because UX and PM roles are still feeling out how to work well together. What can you do?
Use your UX superpowers: Bring your creative problem-solving superpower to the table through your command of art, craft, and communication. Overcome the challenged of synthesizing product research with your systems thinking. Lend your taxonomy wisdom, whether via IA or content strategy, to your product partner’s amorphous model. Contribute your contextual inquiry and qualitative research skills to get beyond the what of data to the why of understanding. Facilitate the prioritization and alignment needs of the product behind all those workshop hours with the stickies and the dot voting. But most of all, design a good friggin’ user experience for the people trying to work with you.
UX Camp 2013: Mobile Camp
Tablet First: Designing Holistic Ubiquitous Experiences
Mobility today means more than handsets in pockets. We are entering a world of ubiquitous network access to always-on cross-channel digital services, bringing multiple new dimensions of complexity to the job of user experience strategy and product design. Many practitioners have embraced or experimented with a philosophy called “Mobile First” as a method of designing a core, minimally viable product, and then selectively extending or scaling the interface for traditional “lapdesk” devices. Christian will discuss a variation on this approach he called “Tablet First,” in which experiences are designed holistically and the prototyped and implemented initially on gesture-based tablets. Because the tablet form factor shares some charcteristics both with smaller handsets and larger lapdesks, solving problems for these devices lays a good foundation for extending the experience out across the full spectrum of touchpoints. Christian will draw on his experience leading the product and design teams at CloudOn, a mobile productivity application that launched initially on the iPad and now reaches customers on iPhones, numerous Android phones and tablets, and through the browser.
