About — Brent Burelle

The arc.

I came up in Montreal's agency scene, learning to ship in two-week sprints across a dozen industries — flight portals, e-commerce, insurance, coworking, security monitoring. What I took away wasn't pixel craft, it was pattern recognition: every industry has a moment where the user does the hardest thing, and the design either gets out of the way or it doesn't.

From 2018 onward I went deep on consumer mobile. Lightspeed's iOS retail app. BiblioCommons across iOS and Android. A senior role at Thriver across three pillars — marketplace, vendor platform, internal CRM — owning the design system through 2020–22. A staff role at Coffee Meets Bagel leading Revenue and Optimization in 2022–23. Then BetterSleep through 2023–25, leading design on Lifecycle and Growth.

In late 2025 I spent the next stretch designing and building Banana — a focused iOS app for shared task management — solo, end-to-end, with Claude Code as the implementation pair. Apple approved it on first submission. The work spans design, React Native, Supabase backend hardening, AI-powered task parsing, deep linking, push notifications, and the full Apple submission flow.

That arc — agency breadth, then consumer depth, then a solo AI-orchestrated ship — is what I bring now. A senior IC who can take a product from sketch to App Store.

How I think about design.

A few principles that travel with me:

Less is more, especially early. The old adage holds up. Too many apps drown new users in simultaneous feature offerings — shorter onboarding, clear and immediate solves for the primary user need on day one, then entice them with more once you've proven your value.
Education should feel like discovery, not instruction. Users should figure out the powerful thing on their own, with a nudge — not have it explained at them.
Design for the users who struggle the most, everyone else benefits. The accessible path is usually the best path for everyone, including the impatient and the half-asleep.
Asking questions is the most accessible superpower. If I feel opposed to an idea, that's the perfect time to get curious about it. Stakeholders drive; I consult on the best route.
Avoid trade-off spirals. You can rarely solve every problem at once. Prioritize the highest ones and commit.
Define the terminology before you design. "Engagement" and "friction" need to become explicit problem statements before they earn time in a design review.

Working with AI tools.

I work with AI tooling as a primary method, not a footnote. With Claude Code as an implementation pair, I take problems from research through shipped product across design and engineering surfaces I wouldn't have authored line-by-line on my own. It's how I shipped Banana solo.

The honest version: the design judgment, the architecture, the product calls, and the testing rigor are mine. The keystrokes are often Claude's. I treat AI like a senior collaborator who needs a clear brief and a critical reviewer. That's a skill of its own.

Tools & surfaces.

Design

Figma (deep — design systems, tokens, libraries)
Adobe Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects)
Abstract (legacy DS workflow)
Native iOS / Material design literacy

Code & build

React Native (Expo SDK 54)
Supabase (Postgres + RLS + Edge Functions in Deno)
Anthropic SDK · Claude API
HTML/CSS/JS, Cloudflare Pages

AI tooling

Claude Code (primary daily driver)
Claude.ai, ChatGPT
Anthropic API for productized features

Process

Jira, Notion, Confluence, Asana
Hypothesis-driven discovery
Design system ownership
Cross-functional facilitation

Education.

Concordia University, Montreal — Bachelor of Fine Arts in Design & Computation Arts (2010–13), Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing (2007–10).

Languages. English — full professional. French — native / bilingual.

What people I've worked with say.

Brent is a goal-driven team leader who can easily visualize the endpoint of a project without losing sight of the steps necessary to get there. He provided valuable insight on the optimization of ads and landing pages, and demonstrated a strong aptitude for creating engaging content. His leadership plays a big role in his team's ability to handle a lot of work and complete it in a short period of time while maintaining a high quality standard.

Andi Brosseuk — Director of Retail Media & Big

I hired Brent for several graphic design projects that varied from digital to print media. Though his first-rate, creative work speaks for itself, I especially appreciated Brent's flexibility and eagerness to please his clients. He worked in tandem with my team to ensure our needs were met and our ideas were heard. He would consistently offer several variations, which I appreciated as it gave us more options and made us feel included in the process.

Beth McPhedran — Head of Brand & Communications, Lightspeed HQ

I've had the pleasure of working with Brent on many different projects. He's a talented designer with a hidden ace up his sleeve: mad copywriting skills. Brent is the creative thinker who excels at taking ideas and rephrasing them to suit his target audience. As an experienced ad designer, he always knows exactly what the user wants to read, and because of his diverse skillset, he's able to write engaging copy and then design the perfect page layout to make his words really shine.

Fergus Baird — Senior Content Marketing Manager, Unity Technologies

Let's talk.

Currently open to Staff Product Designer roles. Best reach is email at b.h.burelle@gmail.com, or DM via LinkedIn. Resume on request.

Staff Product Designer. Twelve years on consumer apps.