Hey, I’m Mekael 👋
I’m a product designer based in Chicago.
Today I work at Runwise, where we put wireless controls on the boilers in old apartment buildings so they stop burning fuel nobody needed them to burn. About 10,400 buildings run on it, which so far is the emissions equivalent of 124,000 cars off the road.
Lately I’ve been building AI agents that read our own software and propose changes to it, with a person approving every one before it goes anywhere.
When I’m not designing you’ll find me at the grill, learning some tool I have no professional reason to learn, or losing an argument to a preschooler.
Say hi at
The project I talked us out of
A year of finished designs, then I pulled the numbers: 498 sessions out of 334,512. I made the case to the head of product who’d been asking for them, and what I proposed instead shipped.
An agent that answers, and a tool with no SQL parameter
I built the agent that answers questions about our own software for people who don’t write code. The retrieval was the easy half. The work was how it answers, and giving its data tool no way to accept arbitrary SQL.
Redesigning the whole app without turning it off
First designer they ever hired. Six months, nine screen areas, every one rebuilt while thousands of buildings ran their heat through it mid-season. One empty state sourced a closed deal.
A credential flow from 5% to 30% conversion
Every piece of this belongs to somebody else. I argued the architecture was the wrong shape, got to redraw it, and conversion went from 5.1% to 29.9% over nine months.
The only designer on the system that inventoried Google’s campus
238 buildings, five organizations, and nobody agreed what the words meant. Forty-six research sessions and six workshops later, ten thousand items landed in the platform’s first month.
An interface for radio waves
One dead repeater quietly takes a whole branch offline. Two surfaces off one state model, now running in 1,300+ buildings: a dependency-ordered dashboard, and a language made of blinking lights.
Tooling for people standing in a basement
Installs lived in a binder of tribal knowledge. Ten guided flows in six weeks, seven of them in a day, and 40% of installs now need no trained technician at all.
“Mekael is not just a designer. He’s also delivering work that an engineer would deliver.”