About Bryan King
Right now, I'm at NaviStone building a brand-new SaaS product that helps Shopify merchants integrate digitally-powered direct mail into their marketing programs.
Previously, I worked with Intuit MailChimp to improve the human–AI relationship on the Creative Assistant team, and shipped the first analytics dashboard to their 14 million users.
I got my start at Flagstar Bank, working in a role that'd now be called 'Design Engineer'. I managed the technical side of a responsive redesign, implemented cutting-edge (at the time) component-driven architecture, resolved ADA compliance lawsuits, and built out custom CMS tooling to help content authors manage thousands of pages on the bank's customer-facing website.
While in school, I studied Management Information Systems, so naturally I've got a knack for discovering business requirements, decomposing the project into parts and sequencing those parts to maximize value delivered to users. My studies left me with a penchant for Agile methodologies, and I'm often the most vocal voice in a given room when it comes to the project's plan.
In my down time at school, I taught myself to code, knowing that mastery of the medium would make me more valuable to any team. Starting with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I dove deep into how the web actually works. Being able to mock up UI directly in the browser accelerated the design process and de-risked my projects in ways that static comps never could. Early in my career, I leaned heavily into CSS, learning state-of-the-art techniques that you can still see in my early work on CodePen. This technical foundation became the bridge between understanding business requirements and delivering solutions that actually work.
Naturally forays into creative coding on the web got me thinking more and more about design. I dove into typography and grid systems, and was heavily inspired by the 20th century masters of graphic design. More and more, I found myself having strong opinions on the visual components of the product.
Together with my business analyst training and my front-end engineering skills, my design sensibilities meant that I could run the product process from start to finish all by myself. I love taking projects from hello world to a fully-functioning product.
In 2021, I completed Mark Ritson's MiniMBA in Marketing, which fundamentally changed how I think about the discipline. While the tech world obsesses over "growth marketing," I learned that real marketing is so much more than integrated comms—it's about understanding markets, building strategy, and creating value. This broader perspective helps me ask better questions when building products: Who are we really serving? What job are they hiring us to do? How do we measure what actually matters?
These days, I'm leaning into more structured approaches to product development. User story mapping, Jobs to Be Done, Shape Up—frameworks I once dismissed as procedural overhead now feel essential for turning ambition into shipped features. Give me a north star metric and I'll figure out how to move it in the right direction.