Abdi IsmailUX / Product

Security engineer turned UX designer turned product builder. I make things for the people the system was never quite built for.

Scroll
SecurityDesignProduct

Three disciplines — one way of seeing

01The Intersection

Most people learned about users in a research lab. I learned about them everywhere else.

A resettlement office. A security operations center. A sales demo call where a customer said something nobody on the product team had thought to ask. I've spent my career at the intersection of systems and the people those systems were never quite built for.

At AWS, I worked inside infrastructure that served millions, and spent most of my time thinking about the engineers who had to use it every day — the friction nobody had filed a ticket for, the workflows that worked on paper and failed at 2am. At Overlap AI, I build tools that go from problem to working prototype in days, because the distance between “someone needs this” and “this exists” should never be as long as it usually is.

I came to product the long way. Security engineering taught me how systems fail. UX research taught me how people absorb that failure quietly, adapt around it, and stop expecting better. Product taught me that the most important skill isn't prioritization or roadmapping — it's knowing which problems are worth solving in the first place.

I'm a first-generation graduate. I grew up without a map for most of the systems I eventually learned to navigate. That doesn't make me a better designer in theory. It means I know what it feels like to be the user nobody designed for. I know where the invisible barriers live because I've stood in front of them.

What I build tends to be quieter than it looks. Less about the feature, more about the moment a user stops having to think about the tool and starts being able to think about their work.

That's the job.

02Selected Work

Six projects across product design, GTM, and growth engineering.

Hover to preview. Select any project to read the full case study — problem, process, and outcome.

03Background

Security taught me how systems break. Design taught me how people think. Product taught me where those two meet.

Experience

Growth Engineer

Overlap AI (YC S24)

Building growth systems at a YC-backed AI startup. Full-stack product engineering with real users, real stakes.

2025 — Present

UX Design & Research

Prime Digital Academy

Intensive apprenticeship: user interviews, usability testing, prototyping, design systems. Four shipped case studies.

2024

Product Management Accelerator

University of Washington

Intensive product training: roadmapping, prioritization frameworks, stakeholder alignment, PRDs, and Kano analysis.

2023

Security Engineer

Amazon Web Services

Threat modeling, infrastructure security, incident response. Learned how systems break before building them.

2021 — 2023

InfoSec Analyst

Ameriprise Financial

Security operations, SIEM management, vulnerability assessment. Where the systems thinking started.

2019 — 2021

Education

Product Management Accelerator

University of Washington

2023

UX Design & Research Certification

Prime Digital Academy

2024

B.S.B. Management of Information Systems

University of Minnesota

2019

Skills

A toolkit assembled across four disciplines — each one a different lens on the same question: what does this person actually need?

Design & Research

FigmaUser InterviewsUsability TestingJourney MappingIAPrototypingDesign Systems

Engineering & AI

GPT-4DALL-E 3FirebaseNext.jsZapierPythonGoogle Apps Script

Product

RoadmappingPrioritizationStakeholder AlignmentPRDsKano AnalysisTech Scoping

Security & Systems

AWSSplunkLinuxCompTIA Security+Network+
04Contact

Let's build something that matters.

Most good things in my life started with a conversation I wasn't sure was worth having.

If you're hiring for product or design roles, I'd love to talk. If you're just building something you're passionate about and want to think out loud with someone else — that works too. Send a note. Let's see if we can build something better.