Micah Horvat
is an outcome oriented design leader with proven experience managing design teams and delivering useful and delightful experiences. He has successfully led product redesigns, developed design systems, and driven product-led growth initiatives. Skilled in user engagement, team building, and strategic collaboration.
is an outcome oriented design leader with proven experience managing design teams and delivering useful and delightful experiences. He has successfully led product redesigns, developed design systems, and driven product-led growth initiatives. Skilled in user engagement, team building, and strategic collaboration.
Recent Products
- Currently Product Design Manager at Edge Delta, an observability platform pioneering edge processing and routing.
- Edge Delta provides unprecedented cost control and flexibility for it's customers, in addition to end-to-end observability and intelligence.
- I manage a small team of designers, and partner closely with engineering and product to constantly refine our design system and overall experience while making aggressive progress on our roadmap.
- My team delivered product design increasing the surface area of the platform by 60% in 4 months.
- This provided a full featured observability suite, overcoming market objections that Edge Delta was a niche product.
- AppOmni is a SaaS Security platform offering a single control surface to manage security posture and threat detection across all of its customers' SaaS products.
- As Product Design Manager, I oversaw an aggressive full product refresh which re-imagined the AppOmni product from the ground up in 6 months.
- I Managed a team of 12, including Designers, Researchers, and Front End Architects.
- The redesign provided a sophisticated feel and drastically simplified experience.
- It introduced new capabilities such as topology mapping, AI remediation guidance, and focused, role-based alerting and prioritization.
- Sonatype is a DevOps suite focusing on OSS component security and management across the software development lifecycle.
- As a Lead Product Designer, I focused primarily on the Lifecycle product, which provides policy authorship and enforcement at various points of the SDLC.
- I designed the first policy configuration workflows and component version compliance visualizations that are still featured prominently in Lifecycle today.
- I was instrumental in the expansion of the design and product teams at Sonatype, recruiting and hiring nine roles from designers to researchers, product owners, design technologists, and a VP of product design
What Colleagues are saying
It's rare to find someone who not only has passion, knowledge, and chops, but can also share, communicate, and educate others on the process behind the work as clearly and kindly as Micah does. With Micah, everything is intentional, and the investment in doing things thoughtfully pays off. I specifically appreciated the effort Micah put into helping our creative team find the ideal crossover between the product and marketing design systems.
Micah is a wonderful design partner and manager and a great supporter and advocate of the design team. He makes sure individual contributors are able to focus on interesting and important work, gives actionable feedback on deliverables, and takes action on feedback that the team provides. I hope there's a another opportunity to work with Micah again.
Micah's expertise in solving complex design problems and his meticulous attention to detail are truly outstanding. Not only did he lead the team with great skill and dedication, but he also created a remarkable remote design studio that was both innovative and efficient. I had the privilege of collaborating with him on rebuilding the design system from the ground up, and his insights and guidance were invaluable to the project's success.
My Design Leadership Values
My motivation as a leader is to nurture and leverage the best that the design discipline has to offer for my team, our organization, and our customers.
.png)
Space for Meaningful Work
I strive to create environments where design work is challenging, impactful, and personally fulfilling.
.png)
Strategic Partnership
I align design efforts with business objectives to drive organizational success.
.png)
Team Empowerment
I foster team growth through guidance, trust, ownership, and accountability.
My Responsibilities
I am focused on efforts to develop our design practices to deliver business value.
Vision and Action
I collaborate with other leaders to craft a strong vision and translate that vision into design challenges that inspire and motivate teams.
Organizational Alignment
I build bridges between design, product, engineering, and business teams to create holistic solutions.
Design Operations
I design and manage design systems and ways of working to ensure design is fully leveraged in my organization.
Change Management
I track and manage product and portfolio changes for wholistic impact and customer adoption.
Talent Management
I hire, motivate, and retain talent for our design teams.
Career Development
I mentor designers, create growth opportunities, and connect individual aspirations with organizational needs.
Design Team Principles
Team principles are unique to each team - they are owned and enforced by the team. However I have a few non-negotiables for the teams I work with.
User-Centric
Understanding user needs is the foundation of meaningful design.
.png)
Hypothesis-Driven
Make assumptions explicit, wherever they come from. Treat design as an iterative process of testing, learning, and refining.
Transparent and Collaborative
Work visibly, share insights, and learn collectively from both successes and failures.
Shout Out
In no particular order, here are some of the people who have positively influenced my work life throughout my career. I'm very lucky to have been influenced by these great humans, and many more!
