Blake Manzo

Blake Manzo

Senior Design Manager in San Francisco, CA

About

Design leadership with a background in growth, monetization, product-market fit and building high performing design teams at scale.

Currently managing design for monetization at Sony PlayStation - the best place to play. I lead experiences to put players at the center and enable over 100 million monthly players to discover, acquire and expand the games they love.

Writing

2023

Google “The Last of Us” and you’ll get an easter egg button you can mash that slowly grows fungus on the screen. 🍄

It’s a perfect example of designing for ✨ moments of delight ✨ to create an emotional connection with people.

2021

How Product Design drives and implements a new brand

With over 150 million monthly creators, Picsart is already the world’s largest creative platform. In 2021 we launched our shiny new brand and visual identity — some key highlights include a new website homepage, a brighter and bolder app UI, and our new font Gilroy.

2020

The Trump campaign is using deceptive and misleading user interface designs to milk more donations out of supporters, and arguably outright steal money.

For those that don’t know — a dark pattern, or dark UX, is an interface that has been designed to trick you into doing something you didn’t necessarily mean to.

Work Experience

2022 — Now
San Francisco

• Managing the store monetization team of 5 product designers, enabling over 100 million monthly players to discover, acquire, and expand the games they love

2020 — 2022
San Francisco

• Managing the growth and monetization team of 6 designers, building for over 150 million people that use Picsart every month
• Serving on the design leadership team for over 50 designers

Picsart is the worlds #1 creative platform and photo and video editor with more than 1 billion app downloads to date. With more than 150 million monthly active creators, the Picsart community creates, remixes and shares nearly 1 billion images every month.

2016 — 2020
Product Design Manager at Tellus

• Leading both product and design teams, focused on growth
• As first designer, scaled from ground zero to 8 designers, 3 PMs and 20+ engineers
• Building out our design system, component library, and team workflows
• Recruit and interview new designers and product managers
• Gather and analyze feedback from data, user studies, and customer service to work into the product
• A/B testing and optimization to design growth experiments

2013 — 2016
Product Designer at crowdcomms

• Worked for Nike as my client designing event management apps
• Conducting UX research at events across Australia and United States
• Rapid prototyping in Material Design and AngularJS

2011 — 2014
Designer at Sneaky Digital

Design partnership specialising in responsive website design and mobile app design.

Contact

Website
LinkedIn

Teams

Current
PlayStation