A photo of Omer looking directly at the camera and winking slightly — A fairly-recent photo of me mid-thought.

Hi, my name is Omer Ziv.

I'm a designer/nerd that works in product and UX.

I've been building little websites forever (well, since 1994), and worked in actual tech jobs since 1999 - as a designer, a developer, and a product manager. I enjoy work that connects UX, code and storytelling in interesting ways, and generally prefer human-intelligence over AI. , and moved around quite a lot over the years - I currently spend most of my time in Tel Aviv, and get to Brooklyn as often as I can.

These days, most of my work is consulting. I’m pretty good at listening and note-taking, breaking down complex problems into smaller, more manageable ones, and reconnecting dots in ways that make sense. Are you working on anything interesting? Please get in touch and tell me all about it.

I'm looking for your portfolio, where is it?

It's been a few years since I designed or built anything all by myself - so instead of a portfolio, I decided to write about some of my favorite past roles and projects. I think this explains my work better than screenshots, anyways.

So - Yes, I'm asking you to read a long list. And - Yes, It's OK to skim.

I joined Wix as Head of Product for the Customer Care organization, shortly after a merger between Customer Care and another product org within the company. This created a unique team that included a large product and R&D group that worked side by side with a huge customer care workforce, which used our products on a daily basis. Together, we aimed to make customer care one of the reasons people choose, and stay with Wix. We custom-built Wix's user-facing Help Center, a Chatbot, and all of the tools used to write and manage content, route different users to the most qualified support agents, and assist these agents in solving and documenting issues during live sessions with customers - all this as generative-AI was starting to emerge as an actual useful tool.

As Head of Product, I was a member of this large organization’s leadership team, and managed our Product and UX teams. I think the most important part of my role was to improve the team’s structure, as well as the connections between our various products. I focused a lot of my time bridging between the product and delivery teams, and helping my own team members solve the challenges they each faced - allowing them to grow in their roles.
I was given the chance to come back to Bezalel Academy's Visual Communications department - on the faculty's side. I started out teaching an introductory HTML/CSS course, and as a teaching-assistant to Gila Kaplan (probably my favorite professor from when I was a student) in her Book Design course.

More recently, I wrote and taught a new interdisciplinary course, in which Design students from Bezalel team up with Computer Science students from the Hebrew University and have one semester to plan, design and actually build small products for non-profit organizations.

I also joined the faculty for the master's program, and taught a course about the relationships between technology, design, government institutions and underground culture.
My last role at Google was as the Product Manager on the Material Design team. Being a part of this talented team and spending my time trying to improve relationships between designers and developers was a dream job.

I joined the team to kick off a complete overhaul of Google Fonts, including both the user-facing website as well as a series of improvements to the library of open-source fonts. Following that, I worked on the new Material.io website and its related tools ahead of the “Material Theming” launch at Google I/O, and on the Google Design website.
I moved to New York to be a Product Manager for Google Docs. At Docs, I helped improve international support (including support for Right-to-left languages), built new document templates, and my favorite feature: the automatic Document Outline.

Docs is one of my all-time favorite products, I’m proud to have worked on it, and the Docs team was an outstanding example of the benefits you get from building respectful relationships between Engineers, UXers and PMs.
I moved to California to be a Product Manager on the Google Play team. My work focused on Discovery - mostly for Apps and Games, and was an early opportunity to learn about machine learning and ranking algorithms.

This was my first proper-Google role, and I was surrounded by some very professional, very impressive individuals. My manager at the time taught me how important it is to set a separate 1:1 just to talk about career goals and work/life balance - I took this to my future managerial roles, quite an important little lesson.
I started working at Waze as a freelancer, when I was in my third year at Bezalel. At the time, Waze was a small startup, and my first project was to plan a complete overhaul of the iOS app’s UX. Once launched, we saw an overnight success - the new version had 2x daily downloads, even though no new features were added (finally - actual proof that design matters).

After a few years of freelancing, I joined the company as the Product & UX lead. My job included both high-level planning of roadmaps and features, and day-to-day guidance of other PMs, designers and engineers. I touched each and every feature leading up to our acquisition by Google. Our team grew significantly, but going to work felt like hanging out with my best friends every day.
Straight out of Bezalel, I joined a small interactive-design studio named BaconOppenheim. Dani and Hovav, who run the studio, built a great little team of designers-that-code and developers-that-care-about-design, and together we worked on projects that were truly state-of-the-art, for clients like Google, the Israel Museum and Face.com.
After studying Industrial Engineering at Tel Aviv University for almost 2 years, I realized I’m bored, quit university, and moved to Jerusalem to study at the Visual Communications department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Probably one of the best decisions of my life - I had an absolutely wonderful, difficult, exciting 4 years there.

As part of this, I was accepted into the student exchange program and moved to New York to study at Parsons for a semester. While there, I interned at Boxee and participated in the EyeWriter collab. My Final Project at Bezalel was a long-form blog named From Points to Pixels that examined Hebrew type design and its shift from print to the web.
In the early internet days, I built a website named uhm.nu/incorporated, where 30ish people posted content for 7 years. It's in Hebrew and it started before they were called "blogs".
I was also in the Swankarmy, where I got to know some of the most talented people I know to this day.