Hey there!
I'm Justin Salamanca, a senior product designer based in LA with 7+ years of experience turning complex problems into clear, intuitive experiences. My work spans from 0→1 products at early-stage startups to financial platforms managing billions in assets.
How I got here
I started small. My first role was as the founding designer at ServiceMob, followed by work with other grassroots startups. As the only designer, I owned everything: research, flows, UI, and working side by side with engineers to get things shipped. That work is over a decade old now, and ServiceMob has since moved into consulting, so it isn’t in my portfolio. But it taught me that when you’re the only designer, nothing is someone else’s job.
To keep growing, I wanted to learn what I couldn’t at a startup: how to design alongside dedicated teams for research, product, and engineering. So I joined Empower, where I grew into a senior product designer. I worked with subject matter experts, presented to executive leadership, and learned how large teams turn ideas into products that millions of people rely on.
Now I want to bring both together: the speed and ownership of a startup with the cross-functional discipline of a big company.
Interested in my skillset?
AI is part of that workflow at every step. I use it to speed up research and pressure-test my assumptions before I open Figma, and I built this site with Claude, taking my own designs from Figma to working code. AI gets me to a first version faster, so I can spend more of my time on what actually needs a designer: the details, the edge cases, and whether the thing should exist at all.
I have a life outside of work too!
Outside of work, I’m usually exploring new ideas and building side projects, from rethinking how we browse the web to experimenting with AI tools in my design process. Besides that, you can also find me: