Ellen Drewes

Building systems that take people's side.

I'm a product designer, builder and leader working at the edges of complexity and possibility. Two decades of experience helping companies from seed to public launch products people trust. Current Founder and Director at Memeador, building the next generation of systems to make AI behave and help humans flourish.

 THREE ENGAGEMENTS OPEN 

Selected work

04 Case Studies

Prosper Lending: building a calmer path

Leading  a full-stack redesign of Prosper’s product, brand, and funnel with a skeleton crew and no margin for error. We rebuilt trust from the ground up — and helped turn around conversion at a critical moment.

Role
Senior Product Designer
CONVERSION
+30%

Practice

A decade of craft

Dot-connector, path-clearer, secret doorway finder.

Systems are the hard work. The soft work — the part where a strange org, a scared founder, and a real customer all start to believe the same thing — is where I've learned to be useful.

  1. 2023 - PRESENT

    Founder, Designer & Builder, Memeador

    A collective of creatives, specializing in product design, branding and strategy for organizations that don't want boring.

  2. 2021 - 2022

    Lead Product Designer, Amplitude

    Radically revamping roadmaps to align experimentation and analytics products with users’s actual workflows and goals.

  3. 2016- 2021

    Principal Product Designer, Quantcast

    Helped transform a company’s process to center the user while leading design of best-in-class adtech and privacy tools used by millions.

  4. 2014 - 2016

    Senior Product Designer, Prosper Marketplace

    Borrower experience, underwriter tools, and the design language that carried them across five years of scale.

Products shipped50+
DESIGNERS MENTORED20+
AWARDS5
Favorite toolsFigma · React · Linear · Framer · Notion · Cursor
Portrait of Ellen Drewes
Portrait · 2026San Francisco, CA

SKILLS

I design the nervous system and fascia  the moments between screens, teams, and decisions, where products actually get built.

Practice

  • Product & interaction design
  • Design systems, tokens, motion
  • Zero-to-one strategy for founders
  • Team formation & IC coaching
  • Branding and visual design
  • User research & program building

Recognition

  • 5 Gold Addy Awards, AIGA
  • Addy Awards Judge, MN
  • Design & Digital Media Instructor, TMCC
  • Featured in Print  & STEP  magazines

Say hello

Let's build the next thing.

SAN FRANCISCO · AVAILABLE REMOTE

Q3-Q4 2026 · THREE SLOTS OPEN