Stevie Gleason
Local time Brooklyn, NY

Product designer with 0-to-1 ownership. Founding designer for three startups. Co-founder of Recover Athletics, acquired by Strava. Currently designer and product owner at Valantis Labs.

Stevie writing outside by a river

Stevie is a product designer, builder, and leader obsessed with craft and based in Brooklyn, New York.

Currently he works as Head of Design at an early-stage startup, doing whatever it takes to help grow the company.

Outside of work you'll find him running, biking, writing music, or painting.

Stevie sitting in a studio chair near painting supplies

Work Experience

2023 - Present

Founding Product Designer & Product Manager, Valantis Labs

Joined as the first product and design hire and now lead product across a five-person crypto fintech team. Own end-to-end product design, roadmap inputs, UX research, launch strategy, GTM systems, marketing site, analytics, and AI-assisted prototyping across trading, staking, yield, and execution products.

Helped ship five 0-to-1 products now used by 4,000+ monthly active users, contributing to roughly $80K MRR across four financial products. Led recent product launches from positioning and waitlist through beta, landing page, content calendar, and launch analytics.

2022 - 01/2023

Founding Product Designer & Product Manager, useHeard Inc.

Led product design and product management for a B2B SaaS music marketing platform that helped record-label teams monetize and scale fan bases.

Researched, designed, and shipped the first beta product within six months, supporting $100K ARR from five enterprise customers. Ran weekly design sprints, wrote product specs, and managed an eight-person remote engineering team through agile delivery.

2020 - 2022

Freelance Product Designer & UX Researcher, Self Employed

Consulted with seven pre-seed to Series A teams across mobile, web, nonprofit, and landing-page work. Delivered UX research, product positioning, user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and responsive web experiences.

Notable work included full-stack landing page design and optimization with IDEO U, plus a nonprofit rebrand that supported $5MM in annual funding across web design, identity, copywriting, pitch decks, and style guide creation.

2018 - 2020

Co-founder, Head of Product, Recover Athletics

Co-founded and led product for a health and fitness app helping endurance athletes prevent injury. Researched, designed, and launched the iOS app, growing from 0 to 5,500 MAUs in six months with 80% 60-day retention before acquisition by Strava.