I’m Reed Reibstein, a product manager and design manager in Philadelphia.
I help agile technology teams connect the dots from high-level strategy to smart, speedy experiments, using my deep design experience to create products people love.
After heading up product design and research at The Philadelphia Inquirer and American City Business Journals, I’m now a product manager at Vanguard, working on our website for financial advisors.
And I'm obsessed with typography.
→ The Philadelphia Inquirer
As Product Design Manager at The Philadelphia Inquirer, I led the web, iOS, and Android design and user research team and set UX strategy as we reimagined our product set.
After joining The Inquirer, I helped define our product strategy to grow subscriptions, session engagement, and habit. Then I led the iterative design process across all our products, centered on mobile-first, personalized news feeds and intuitive e-commerce, to substantial engaged time and mobile checkout conversion rate improvements.
I also grew our design and user research capabilities: hiring product designers, establishing a user research practice to make it part of our product development process, and promoting design and product thinking to executives.
→ ACBJ and García Media
Before The Inquirer, I was the Director of Product Design at American City Business Journals in Charlotte, N.C., where I led the product design and user research team for 43 business journals. I set UX strategy for over a dozen news and B2B product lines, and a homegrown CMS. I kickstarted our user research practice, redesigned our 43 homepages, optimized our e-commerce flow, and promoted client-side and SDK-enabled A/B testing, with one test leading to a 77% increase in homepage engagement.
I’ve also been Director of Product Design and an art director for the global media design and strategy firm García Media. I collaborated with CEO and founder Mario García on a number of projects across multiple platforms and in more than eight countries.
Highlights from my seven years were the print and digital relaunch of McClatchy’s 29 American newspapers and designing and developing responsive websites for Columbia Journalism Review and García Media. Mario and I taught a class at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism on multi-platform design and storytelling.
→ Typography
I’ve been a huge type nerd since high school, and I’m rarely happier than when putting together the perfect type palette for a project.* For the last six years, I’ve been invited to participate in Typographica’s annual feature, “Our Favorite Typefaces,” reviewing Mexica, Brenner, IBM Plex, Triade, Druk Text / Druk Text Wide, and Quire Sans.
I’ve also conducted research on type and design history. My essay on Yale University’s architectural lettering was published in Codex: The Journal of Letterforms, and my research identifying the First Folio’s text font has been cited in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's First Folio. My paper on the design of five historical editions of Hamlet received the A. Conger Goodyear Fine Arts Award for an outstanding senior essay on any topic in the History of Art at Yale University.
→ Get in touch
You can find me on Twitter at @rreibstein and on LinkedIn. Some of my writing is on Medium. Email me at reed.reibstein@gmail.com.