London, Ontario · English + Spanish

Designing products,
services, and systems
with close to two decades
of depth.

Senior product designer, UX architect, and service designer working across government, PropTech, fintech, sports tech, and enterprise platforms — bringing together UX architecture, service design, product strategy, and AI-enabled workflow thinking.

View selected work Start a conversation

Career arc

From development roots to design and systems leadership.

The common thread is systems thinking: understanding how products, services, people, and constraints connect — then figuring out the right place to design.

Foundation

Design, product, and engineering fluency.

Started in development and multimedia. Still works with buildability, structure, and implementation in mind.

Overview

Close to two decades of practice across government, PropTech, fintech, automotive, and sports tech
Bilingual in English and Spanish, with experience spanning leadership, architecture, research, and delivery
Comfortable at every level — from executive strategy and service mapping down to the actual product design and how it behaves

Focus

UX architecture, product design, service design, systems thinking, and AI-enabled workflow planning.

Sectors

Government, PropTech, fintech, sports tech, automotive, and eLearning.

Approach

Strategic, calm, research-backed, and built for operational reality.

Selected work

Four projects. Different industries, different challenges, the same underlying approach.

What connects them is a consistent instinct: understand how the product, the service, and the people fit together before deciding what to change. That's what makes the work hold — across sectors, scales, and types of problems.

01 PropTech / Product Strategy / AI-Enabled Workflows

Casa Púrpura

Designing a PropTech platform from service model to AI-assisted workflow planning.

Head of Service Design & Product since January 2022, defining the end-to-end service model, workflow standardization, modular platform architecture, and governance for El Salvador's first PropTech platform.

Mapped agent-facing interactions to backstage systems, role-based access, and data models.
Directed UX strategy across CRM, property management, opportunity flows, marketing automation, and AI-assisted workflows.
Framed AI as part of operational workflow design rather than a detached feature.

View case study →

02 Government / UX Architecture / Service Design

Transport Canada

Turning a fragmented engagement platform into a unified, scalable system.

Senior UX Architect Consultant and service designer across multiple Transport Canada teams since February 2022, shaping information hierarchies, service blueprints, platform governance, and modular data structures.

Led UX architecture across multiple program areas and enterprise-scale transformation work.
Worked with executives, regional directors, inspectors, SMEs, engineers, and product owners.
Used service blueprints, journey maps, wireframes, and low-fidelity prototypes to define future-state service models.

View case study →

03 Sports Tech / Service Innovation / Product Design Leadership

EventConnect

Redesigning tournament travel coordination at operational scale.

Product Design Manager and UX Lead from October 2018 to February 2022, leading service design research and redesigning core booking and accommodation flows.

Improved booking completion by 28%.
Reduced support ticket volume by 35%+.
Platform supported more than 6,000 hotel room nights daily during tournaments across North America.

View case study →

04 Automotive / Service Design / Consumer Product

CARFAX Canada

Reworking the pre-purchase vehicle experience through research and co-design.

UX/UI Lead from March 2016 to January 2018, leading research, service blueprinting, usability testing, and cross-functional co-design across consumer and dealership touchpoints.

Ran field research, diary studies, and co-design labs with customer service reps, dealership partners, and drivers.
Produced journey maps, service blueprints, and system diagrams for cross-channel flows.
Contributed to digital transformation work expanding the product line for dealer inventory purchase and pre-sale.

View case study →

Practice

I start with the whole picture, then design at the right layer.

Most design challenges aren't solved at the screen level. They're solved by first understanding the service, the people, the platform, and how everything connects. That's where I tend to start — and it's what lets me move between research, architecture, product design, and workflow thinking depending on what the problem actually needs.

UX Architecture

Designing how platforms and products are structured — what information lives where, how people navigate and interact, and how the whole thing can scale without breaking down.

Service Design

Mapping how services actually work — from what people experience on the surface to the teams, tools, and systems behind it — so every design decision connects to how things get delivered.

Product Design

End-to-end product thinking from early research and concepts through to final design, testing, and launch — with the hands-on craft to see it through.

Systems Thinking

Seeing products, services, operations, and data as one connected environment — and knowing which layer to work at to make meaningful change.

AI-Enabled Product Work

Figuring out how AI features, assistants, and automated workflows fit into real products and the people using them — not as add-ons, but as something that actually changes how work gets done.

Research and Facilitation

Running interviews, usability sessions, and workshops with the right people — from executives and operators to the people actually doing the work — to understand what's real before deciding what to design.

About

Built on development roots, design leadership, and two decades of systems work.

AJ Gutierrez is a senior product designer, UX architect, and service designer based in London, Ontario. His work spans close to two decades across government, fintech, PropTech, sports technology, automotive, and enterprise platforms.

What makes that range hold together is a consistent instinct: understand how the whole thing works before deciding what to change. Sometimes that means deep research and service mapping. Sometimes it means platform structure, governance, or how a product should actually behave. Increasingly, it also means figuring out how AI-assisted behaviors and human workflows fit together inside real products.

The result is someone who is comfortable with ambiguity, executive context, and the kind of operational constraints that make complexity genuinely hard to address.

Experience

From hands-on craft to enterprise architecture and product leadership.

2022 - Present