Pillar4 Media
Cross-Brand UX Strategy Across a Revenue-Driven Portfolio
I drive UX strategy across a portfolio of 10+ consumer and partner brands, turning design from a support function into one of the company’s primary revenue levers. Over three years, that’s meant building experimentation systems, scaling design patterns across brands, and partnering with product, engineering, and editorial teams to generate $25M+ in measurable revenue.
Measurable Results
Incremental revenue generated across owned and partner brands.
Experimentation output increased through structured testing processes.
Average conversion rate improvement across major initiatives.
Average take rate increase across monetized experiences.
Average revenue per visit improvement.
Highest performing conversion improvement from quiz optimization.
Business Landscape
Pillar4 operates a portfolio of high-traffic consumer brands alongside strategic publishing partnerships. Driving performance across this ecosystem required consistent UX standards, experimentation frameworks, and product systems that could scale across multiple brands and audiences.
Pillar4’s owned brands generate revenue through high-intent organic traffic and affiliate commerce. Improving performance required aligning UX structure, experimentation, and product discovery across multiple sites.
- Sleepopolis
- Garage Gym Reviews
- BarBend
- Swolverine
- Mattress Nerd
- Mattress Clarity
- Morning Chalk Up
- Aging In Place
- Sleep Advisor
- Breaking Muscle
Pillar4 also collaborates with major publishing and consumer brands, supporting UX improvements that strengthen product discovery and monetization while maintaining each partner’s brand standards.
- Self
- Fortune
- AARP
- NCOA
- Help Guide
- Eargo
- Yes Hearing
- Audien Hearing
- Medical Guardian
- Sports Illustrated
How UX Became a Revenue Driver
UX evolved from a support function into a strategic revenue driver across the organization.
When I joined, UX was largely a support function. Design happened downstream of decisions that had already been made. I worked with product leadership to change that, embedding UX into revenue strategy and experimentation planning from the beginning. Over three years, this shift contributed to $25M+ in incremental revenue across organic and paid initiatives.
UX became part of revenue planning, not just implementation.
Scaling across 10+ brands meant I couldn’t design one-off solutions for every site. I built shared design patterns, standardized CTA hierarchy and monetization placement across templates, and rebuilt parts of the design workflow around Claude and Claude Code to move faster without losing quality. The goal was to make performance improvements repeatable rather than incidental.
Every UX decision tied back to a measurable outcome. Conversion rates, take rates, revenue per visit, and experimentation velocity all became part of how we evaluated design work. The metrics at the top of this page are the result of that shift in how we measured success.
Working Across Teams
Revenue performance strengthened through tighter coordination across acquisition and lifecycle teams.
Partnered with product managers and engineers to translate experimentation insights into scalable product improvements.
- Influenced backlog prioritization using experimentation data, shifting engineering investment toward the highest-revenue opportunities
- Reduced iteration cycles by formalizing testing workflows
- Compressed design-to-code delivery using Claude Code, shipping prototypes and test variants without a dev dependency
UX collaborated with paid media teams to optimize landing experiences and improve conversion performance.
- Designed and optimized paid landing templates tied directly to return-on-spend targets
- Standardized monetization hierarchy across paid experiences to reduce friction between ad intent and on-page content
- Improved revenue per visit through structural landing page improvements
Worked closely with SEO and editorial teams to ensure UX improvements supported both ranking performance and user intent.
- Ensured monetization elements didn't disrupt search intent or ranking performance
- Refined comparison and review templates to balance editorial trust with revenue clarity
- Used behavioral data to inform layout changes on the highest-traffic organic pages
AI in the Design Workflow
AI is embedded in how I actually design, not a separate initiative on the side. Over the last year I’ve rebuilt pieces of my workflow around Claude and Claude Code, from pre-design research through post-design handoff. The work gets done faster and the team’s baseline output has moved up. Here’s where it shows up in practice.
AI shortens every phase of the design process, not just one.
- Pre-design research, competitor analysis, and strategy alignment built from structured prompting rather than manual synthesis
- UX writing, marketing copy, and content variation generated and iterated in hours instead of days
- Information architecture and user flow drafts produced collaboratively with Claude, refined with the team
- Design generation through Figma MCP, bridging prompts directly into editable Figma artifacts
AI has changed what design can deliver before engineering gets involved.
- Code generation for testing platform experiments, letting the team ship A/B tests without a dev dependency
- Production-ready prototypes used for stakeholder sign-off before handoff
- UI kit creation from live sites into Figma, cutting what used to be multi-day audits down to a few hours
- Design token generation and export automated into the dev handoff, reducing manual CSS work for engineering
The biggest gains come from AI being a team practice, not a personal one.
- Biweekly AI working sessions with the design team to share workflows, prompts, and what's working
- Actively pushing AI adoption into product management and engineering, not keeping it inside design
- Partnering with engineering on tokenization and block-level build patterns to reduce manual CSS across the site portfolio
- Treating prompt engineering as a shared craft, documented and iterated like any other part of the design system
Portfolio-Wide Applications
The strategic framework was applied across multiple brands, adapting UX systems to different audiences and monetization models.
Designed an internal platform used across Pillar4 brands to manage and distribute affiliate links across high-traffic content and commerce experiences.
Led UX strategy and experimentation for a high-traffic affiliate platform, aligning search intent, content structure, and monetization pathways to drive sustained revenue growth.
Led UX direction across Garage Gym Reviews, improving mobile usability, product discovery, and purchase decision clarity through structured experimentation and UX optimization.
Conducted a full UX audit and led a redesign of the Swolverine ecommerce experience to improve product discovery, supplement education, and mobile usability.
Sleepopolis
Garage Gym Reviews
Swolverine
