Hi, I'm Francis Wu 👋
Early-stage products fail because of what gets built, not how it looks. I've spent 25 years at the intersection of both — and I've got the PM title, the acquisition, and the scar tissue to prove it.
Portfolio
Promote: Google Ads for SMBs
Led product and design for an ML-powered Google Ads platform targeting SMBs — built from scratch on Acquisio's ML infrastructure, distributed through agency and enterprise partnerships, and ultimately acquired by Web.com.
Worry-Free Transactions: No News is Good News
Reframed a stakeholder request at OneSpan to unlock a more valuable problem — then built the business case and blueprint before a single screen was designed.
SocialGrapes: Wine for Everyone
Founding designer on a consumer social app that was doing for wine what Untappd eventually did for beer — before the infrastructure existed to support it.
OneSpan Design System: Accessibility at Scale
Hired to unify a fragmented multi-app portfolio into a single design system — then had to adapt strategy when engineering buy-in stalled.
Articles
The Opportunity Cost of Rigidity
Jan 2024
Use risk to justify design systems, strong DevOps, and effective product management.
Gherkin for Designers
Apr 2022
Learn Gherkin to win the hearts of product, development, and documentation teams.
Notable Experience
Product Designer at Negosh
Jan 2025 — Apr 2026
First design hire at Negosh, a brand licensing marketplace startup. Designed across the full product surface — from early-stage flows to UI — while staying close to product decisions in a small, fast-moving team. Conducted market and domain research to inform design direction.
Senior UX Designer at OneSpan
Jun 2020 — Jan 2025
Designed and maintained design systems that accelerate OneSpan's product design and development. Directly contributed to the design of almost all of OneSpan's portfolio of products.
Product Manager at Acquisio
Jun 2015 — Jul 2019
Led product, design, and delivery for Promote — a self-serve, ML-powered Google Ads platform for SMBs built from scratch on Acquisio's ML infrastructure — from 0 to acquisition by Web.com. Across a core team of 5–9, I owned the full PM function: user research and discovery, roadmap definition and prioritization, writing specs, and coordinating engineering. I also served as lead designer and front-end integrator — compressing cycles that normally require handoffs across three separate roles.
Lead UX Developer at Qwalify
May 2012 — Jun 2015
A talent engagement platform used by brands such as Home Depot, Scotiabank, and Roots Clothing Company. Learned BDD to increase the development velocity by 15%.
User Experience Designer at SocialGrapes
Jul 2010 — Jan 2012
An oenophile's web and mobile social network that was ahead of its time, doing for wine what Untappd eventually did for beer. Learned to design for mobile.
Web Designer/Programmer at Standout Jobs
Oct 2007 — Oct 2009
A recruiting portal Acquired by Talemetry. Learned to integrate designs in a Ruby on Rails app and how to push code to GitHub.
Web Designer/Integrator at Wine Price Exchange
Sep 2004 — Oct 2006
Wine Price Exchange was a wine cellar management and appraisal web app. Learned to integrate designs in a PHP app.
Generalist at mdf commerce
Jun 1998 — Sep 2003
mdf commerce builds B2B marketplaces. Increased database entry speed by 500% by streamlining its workflow, redesigning its core tool, and rebuilding it. Learned the basics of web design and usability.
Education and Certificates
Computer Science Technology
Jun 1998
DEC (Associate's Degree) issued by Champlain College Saint-Lambert
About
I've spent 25 years closer to product decisions than most designers ever get.
At Acquisio, I held the PM title while we built Promote — a machine-learning ad platform for SMBs — from scratch. We owned the full funnel: ML-automated campaigns, conversion-optimized landing pages, and Twilio-powered call attribution that proved ROI to an audience that had been burned by agencies their whole lives. The product was acquired by Web.com. I've also designed systems that saved enterprise customers an estimated $140K per transaction cycle, unified fragmented product portfolios into coherent design systems, and written more Gherkin than most PMs will ever see.
I'm a product designer making the deliberate move to PM — not because design stopped mattering, but because I want to own the problem, not just the solution. I'm drawn to 0→1 and early-PMF environments where the lines between product, design, and strategy are still usefully blurry, and where being able to run discovery and open Figma and write a spec in the same afternoon is an asset rather than an anomaly.
Most recently first design hire at Negosh, a brand licensing marketplace startup. Based in Montreal.
Let's connect
I'm always up for a chat about design, working together, and .
Forked from resume-template and subsequently hand-adapted by Francis Wu © 2026