AI Strategy & Product Design
The design and AI leadership your team is missing.
We work with founders and early-stage teams as a fractional design and AI partner. If no one on your team is accountable for the full user experience — from the empathy behind product decisions to how your business presents itself across every touchpoint — we fill that seat. Fractional engagement, senior leadership, real execution.
Founders usually come to us with something specific in mind — a dashboard, a workflow tool, a product feature. They've already decided what needs to be built.
Your biggest AI opportunity probably isn't what you think it is.
That's not a knock on how founders think. It's just that the highest-leverage moment in a business is rarely obvious from the inside. It's buried in a workflow nobody questions, a dataset nobody's using, a handoff that bleeds hours every week. You can't see it clearly when you're running the company.
That's what we do first. Before we design anything, before we write a line of code — we find it. Then we build it.
Services
The strategic design partner your team is missing.
We operate as a fractional design and AI leadership partner — not an agency, not a freelancer. One senior partner, embedded in your business, accountable for outcomes.
01
Design Intelligence Audit
Before we design anything, we learn everything. We conduct a comprehensive audit of your competitive landscape — then build an automated monitoring system that tracks competitor moves in real time, so you're never caught off guard. We facilitate design thinking workshops that bring diverse perspectives into the room to surface the gaps and friction points in your product and experience. And we map the full user journey — not as a deliverable, but as a living north star that guides every product and design decision that follows.
02
AI Clarity Audit
A structured, time-boxed deep dive into your product, operations, and data — mapping the highest-leverage AI opportunities and delivering a prioritized roadmap. The goal isn't just a better plan. It's a fundamental shift in how your company thinks — toward an AI-first mindset that embraces what's now possible and builds toward it intentionally.
03
Establish Design DNA
Before anything gets built, we establish the design foundation — the principles, visual language, and system logic that ensure every touchpoint feels like a single, premium ecosystem. This is the work that makes everything that follows coherent.
04
Product Strategy & Build
We are capable of leading the design and build of any new product or feature from the top — overseeing and reviewing the entire process with decades of design and technology experience and judgment. The right decisions get made at every stage, and what ships matches the vision.
05
AI Workflow Design
Custom AI tools, workflow automations, and agent deployments built directly into your operations — not bolted on after the fact. We identify the highest-value automation opportunities and build them to production quality.
06
Executive Design Leadership
Most early-stage companies have a founder, a finance lead, and a sales function. Almost none have someone responsible for how the business looks, communicates, and presents itself — across investors, customers, employees, and vendors. That's what a Chief Design Officer does. We provide that function on a fractional basis, so you get the strategic leadership without the full-time executive overhead.
Approach
Design is moving upstream. We've always been there.
AI is changing where design happens. Execution is getting faster, cheaper, and increasingly automated. What it can't replace is judgment — knowing which problems are worth solving, which opportunities are hiding in plain sight, and how to sequence the work so it compounds.
That's always been the highest-leverage part of this work. We've just built a firm around it.
Every engagement starts the same way: we get close to your business before we touch your product. We study the workflows, follow the data, talk to the people running it. The diagnosis comes before the prescription — and what that looks like is different every time.
What never changes: we don't sell you a process. We solve your problem.
Selected Work
Problems we've solved.
Walmart
Enterprise AI pattern development and governance at scale
We led the design of agentic AI patterns and frameworks for Walmart's merchandising and supplier organization — establishing, testing, and validating the design standards that were eventually adopted company-wide. As AI agents proliferated across business units, Walmart needed a coherent system rather than a patchwork of individual deployments. Our work became the foundation: the governance frameworks, guardrails, and protocol infrastructure that now allows individual employees to spin up and deploy agents at scale across one of the largest retail operations in the world.
McKinsey & Company / Medtronic
Redesigning the surgical planning experience for a global MedTech leader
View case study →Medtronic's Surgeon Hub platform supported complex spinal surgical planning across surgeons, lab engineers, and OR staff — but fragmented communication, poor mobile performance, and disjointed data systems were creating friction at every step of the care continuum. Working embedded within a McKinsey engagement team, we led all design efforts: qualitative research across 13 surgeons and 6 lab engineers at academic hospitals, private practices, and large hospital systems; client ideation workshops; journey mapping across the full pre-op to post-op arc; and high-fidelity prototyping through to a tested, approved UI. The result was a mobile-first redesign of Surgeon Hub that unified the clinical workflow, reduced cognitive load for front-line staff, and established the UX and design system architecture to support platform scaling.
McKinsey & Company / Teck Resources Limited
Building an AI maintenance advisor for a major mining operation
View case study →A major generative AI use case: a conversational AI copilot for maintenance workers and technicians at a large-scale mining site, designed to reduce equipment downtime and eliminate the manual, fragmented workflows that slowed diagnosis and repair. Embedded as the design lead on a five-week McKinsey engagement, we owned the full design process — qualitative research with maintenance workers, supervisors, and operations personnel; journey mapping across awareness, diagnosis, logistics, and repair phases; internal ideation sessions with data scientists and engineers; and the design and prototyping of the AI tool interface itself. The proof of concept was presented to the board of directors and unanimously approved for development. It entered engineering in Q4 2023.
About
We're a boutique firm built around one belief: the most valuable thing a designer can do is think like a strategist.
Ruth Design Co. is an AI strategy and product design consultancy. We work with founders and leadership teams who need a senior partner — someone who can diagnose the real problem, set the direction, and make sure the right thing gets built. We're small by design. Every engagement is led by a principal, not handed off to a junior team.
Tyler Burton, Founder & Principal
Tyler brings 12 years of product design experience across creative agencies, enterprise product organizations, and management consulting — with a track record of embedding in complex, high-stakes environments and delivering systems that actually ship.
Before founding Ruth Design Co., he spent two years as a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he learned to diagnose business problems before proposing design solutions. His McKinsey engagements spanned regulated industries and capital-intensive operations — including a generative AI tool for a major mining operation that was unanimously approved by its board and moved into engineering within the engagement timeline.
He went on to lead product design at Walmart, where he helped establish the agentic AI pattern library and governance frameworks now deployed across one of the largest retail AI ecosystems in the world. Earlier in his career, he designed digital products for the NFL, Apple Music, Meta, Google, and Samsung.
He founded Ruth Design Co. to bring that combination — consulting rigor, enterprise-grade design execution, and hands-on AI building capability — to the companies that need it most but rarely have access to it.
AI Clarity Audit
Not sure where to start? Start with an AI Clarity Audit.
The AI Clarity Audit is a structured, time-boxed engagement designed to answer one question: where is the highest-leverage opportunity in your business for design and AI?
We study your product, your operations, and your goals — and deliver a prioritized roadmap with a working prototype of your top opportunity. Most clients use the Audit to align their leadership team and validate their direction before committing to a larger build. It's a defined scope, a fixed price, and a clear outcome. A good way to start.