Episode #33: Skyler Rexrode on Cohesive Product Design

Skyler Rexrode's design education started before college, when he and a friend made skateboards from plywood and Skyler painted custom artwork on them. Fine art led him to graphic design, then to advertising work on websites and digital campaigns. From there, his career moved through weather products, retail robots, data visualization, and the Quantcast advertising platform.

That range gives this conversation with Dwayne Samuels a consistent theme: the medium changes, but a designer still has to understand how people interpret signals, make tradeoffs visible, and create a system that can grow.

What you'll learn

• How a full product audit can reveal features to combine, update, or remove

• Why designing for a physical robot changes the meaning of light, sound, size, and timing

• How a design team can make siloed product areas feel cohesive

• Where A/B testing, user archetypes, internal expertise, and customer validation each contribute

• Why tool resistance can become a prompt to keep learning rather than defend an old workflow

Learn from every design medium

After shifting from fine art to graphic design, Skyler began with print materials such as brochures and posters. An advertising internship introduced him to UI, UX, websites, booking interfaces, and a large volume of banner ads. He later moved to San Francisco, freelanced on branding and basic websites, and decided that the clearest way to earn a full-time product design role was to focus directly on doing product design.

At Weather Underground, he joined during a major redesign. The team audited products that had gone untouched or been forgotten, deciding which could be combined and which should be removed. They updated the identity, color palette, and page styles, while moving the experience from adaptive to responsive design. The project taught Skyler how to take responsibility for one broad product, understand its user base, and refine it as a coherent whole.

His next role at Bossa Nova expanded the medium. A robot traveled through Walmart aisles to scan product facings and identify items that were out of stock, misplaced, or in need of reordering. Skyler worked on the data visualizations generated from the robot, but he also collaborated with robotics engineers on its lights and sounds.

Design behavior, not decoration

A physical robot forced Skyler to consider how design operates in shared space. An LED strip had to communicate actions such as turning. Camera lights that remained bright while the machine rounded a corner could startle a shopper and interfere with the robot's operation. His goal was to make the large machine feel more like a friendly presence than an intimidating tower of cameras.

That work made design more tangible. People respond differently to an interface on a screen than to a moving object nearby. Color, light patterns, sound, and timing were not decorative choices. They communicated intent and shaped whether people felt safe enough to behave normally around the product.

At Quantcast, Skyler still favors simplicity, white space, and restrained use of color. The platform used a largely black-and-white interface with a flagship blue for actions. The design team was working to add color to data visualizations in ways that carried meaning, making the information more useful rather than merely more colorful. Skyler also likes moments of delight, but user empathy and clarity remain the foundation.

Build a system that can grow

Skyler joined Quantcast around the launch of a major platform in 2021. Although the company was established, the product team initially worked with a startup-like pace. After launch, the challenge shifted toward refining ideas, addressing technical debt, and unifying areas created by teams that had worked in silos.

The design team's work included a new color palette, button styles, table styles, and a cohesive visual direction across the platform. Future-proofing was part of the goal because new features would need room to fit without fragmenting the experience again. At the same time, the team continued listening to users and improving existing products.

Decision-making drew on several evidence sources. Teams used Optimizely for A/B tests when multiple solutions could be compared. They refined user archetypes to create a more consistent reference point. Colleagues with firsthand experience using Quantcast in previous jobs could supply practical domain knowledge, but their views still needed customer validation.

Skyler identifies workload management as a recurring challenge because new ideas easily capture his attention. Planning by day, week, and month helps counter the impulse to drop current work whenever an exciting request arrives. His history with design tools provides a related lesson. He resisted moving from Photoshop to Sketch, then later hesitated over Figma before adopting each newer workflow. Expertise in one tool can feel like a reason to avoid another, but his experience shows that trying the unfamiliar option can change the work for the better.

Listen to Episode #33 for Skyler's full journey through product, robotics, and platform design.