Péter Balázs Polgár

Journey

I make systems work for humans, at every altitude.

Fifteen years of it: founding and leading design teams, and getting hands-on with the technical work when that's what's needed. I build coherence into products and portfolios, and the durable foundations that both teams and agentic workflows can build on.

UX Researcher 2011–2014
Head of UX 2015–2018
Senior UX Manager 2018–2021
Lead Product Designer 2021–2023
Lead Experience Designer 2024–

Driving product coherence at scale

When teams build independently, products fragment. I align them around the user's journey so the whole feels like one product, and holds together as a system teams and their agents can build on.

Senior UX Manager · Trustpilot · 2018 - 2021 Aligning teams through an IA redesign Unified seven teams' fragmented B2B app behind one information architecture. ~20% more users reached their intended flows, and the IA outlived me by years.

Shaping strategy through design vision

Design can show the future, not just argue about it. I use vision and prototypes to steer strategy and align leadership.

Lead Product Designer · Krisp · 2021 - 2023 Shaping product strategy through design vision A vision prototype that moved Krisp from a feature to a product, and redirected the roadmap behind it.

Embedding discovery into product decisions

Good products come from understanding, not assumptions. I make discovery rigorous enough that the understanding lasts, becoming context the whole team and their agents can act on.

Lead Product Designer · Krisp · 2021 - 2023 Raising org maturity through product work Used real product work to pull a startup's practices up a maturity level, discovery by example, not decree.

Building and scaling design teams

A good team makes everyone around it better. I build teams with clear growth, embedded practice, and deliberate org design.

Head of UX · Emarsys · 2015 - 2018 Designing a UX team Built Emarsys' first UX team and practice from scratch, with the next two heads of UX promoted from within.

Foundations

Earlier, as a UX researcher at Prezi, I built the craft this all rests on, and a habit of learning in public.