Ian Limbaga

Leadership · Product · Design · AI

Building solutions
that simplify complexity.

I build and design around people first. Safety, governance and inclusivity are considered up front, while never losing the business case. Building great products and experiences have always meant holding competing needs in balance. I cultivate curiosity in teams building the habit of finding the right questions to ask. It gets messy. We get through it. That's part of the job.

See selected works What I'm building now

Leadership

Hands on leader to designers and researchers. Building bridges with engineering, product and marketing.

Systems & Operations

Navigating organizational dynamics and politics to build solutions and systems for scale.

Facilitation

Run and lead discovery and problem finding sessions fostering alignment and innovation.

Design Principles

The teams that win the AI era will be the ones who kept people at the center of it.

Most of the industry is racing to lead with the technology. I think that is backwards. The hard part was never the model. It is deciding what should be built, for whom, and where the line is. That is product judgment, and it matters more now, not less.

My job is to hold three things together that teams tend to pull apart: what people actually need, what the system is safe to do, and what the business has to achieve. Keeping those in balance is the whole discipline.

Human benefit

Start from the person and the outcome they need, then bring AI to it. Not the other way around.

Safety & governance

Behavioral boundaries, risk tiers, and escalation paths designed in from the start, not bolted on after launch.

Business outcomes

Every decision ties to adoption, conversion, and cost. Human-centered and commercially sharp are not opposites.

Selected work

Proof, not promises.

A few places where the approach held up under real enterprise pressure.

Inovalon Design System overview
01 — Design Systems

One design system across four business units

Built Inovalon's first unified design system on top of legacy frameworks across 40+ digital products, with an adoption strategy and c-suite advocacy pushing the change across the organization.

Design SystemsAdoptionHealthcare
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Inovalon Application Portal
02 — Enterprise SaaS

From friction to first value: the Inovalon Application Portal

Designed the onboarding, feature disvovery, and adoption experience end to end. Made financial case for operational savings and improving sales velocity, winning C-suite sponsorship.

Enterprise SaaSGovernanceAdoption
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Cairya zero-to-one AI product
03 — AI Product

From concept to first client: a Conversational AI product with guardrails built-in.

Led a research-validated pivot that landed the first enterprise client in six months. Set the behavioral boundaries so AI performed with acceptably predictability in demos and pilots.

StrategyDesign SystemsAI Safety UX
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Asian Development Bank Funding Resource Portal
04 — Enterprise UX

Accelerating global program start dates by improving discoverability of ADB's multi-billion dollar funding portal.

Redesigned the Asian Development Bank's Funding Resource Portal — increasing access to critical resources by nearly 50% and accelerating project initiation timelines.

Enterprise UXAdoptionConsulting
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ITCI biotech 300% growth systems
05 — Strategy

Building growth strategy impacting HR & Operations team of a biopharmaceutical company undergoing hypergrowth stage.

Built the process and operational foundations for a biopharmaceutical company during their hyper growth stage (from 80 to 300+ employees by end of 2019) utilizing the full breadth of consulting skills to assess the systems, create an onboarding experience, and define top priorities for the first 90-120 days.

StrategyOnboardingService Design
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L'Oreal ML attrition model
06 — Machine Learning

Machine Learning Model that triggered new HR functions and capabilities.

Delivered L'Oreal USA's first Machine Learning based employee attrition model, at 82% accuracy. After presenting to the C-suite, project success triggered the creation of a People Analytics function, for the US and for the global HQ.

Data StorytellingStrategyGlobal Impact
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Let's build something meaningful.

Designing for people cannot be another buzzword. It's my guiding statement. It helps me keep usefulness, safety and the business case from drifting apart from each other as a product takes shape.

Open to leadership roles, consulting opportunities and fractional roles.

Email me