Rodney Resella

I'm a design director with over twenty years across science, regulation, and software at scale. The work has ranged from regulated genomics platforms at Illumina to FDA-validated oncology software at Varian Medical Systems to Google's ad policy enforcement to enterprise software at Dell. What ties those together isn't the industry. It's that design in each of them had to earn its seat at the table, and the cost of getting it wrong wasn't a bounce rate. It was a clinical outcome, a regulatory risk, or the trust of users who couldn't be replaced by acquiring new ones.

I joined Illumina as the lead interaction designer on both the software and instrument control verticals, and over time became the product owner of the Radiance Design System, a role I still hold. That arc from craft contributor to system owner is how I think about design leadership: you earn the mandate by doing the work, and you grow the function by building the infrastructure that makes everyone around you faster and more confident. Radiance is now 359 components across two intentionally architected libraries, measured against a five-level adoption rubric, and used across 13 software products and 4 instrument platforms in a regulated environment spanning RUO and IVD classifications.

I lead with clarity of mandate and earned influence. Design at director level is a discipline of trade-offs. Speed versus validation. Exploration versus convergence. What's defensible versus what's exciting. I've spent two decades navigating those in environments where science historically led, and where design's value had to be demonstrated through business and clinical impact, not asserted through title or process. I build teams the same way: high standards, clear principles, and the conviction that good people thrive when they know their mandate and have the trust to execute it.

What I want to do next is at the intersection of hardware, software, and patient outcomes. Organizations scaling new product lines where design systems thinking, regulated-environment fluency, and the ability to unify consumer and clinical experiences in the same portfolio are genuinely rare. That's where I've built my career. And where I have the most to contribute.