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§ 01 — Premise By Niya Sisk

Founders don't need execution. They need their vision made impossible to ignore.

We partner with early-stage founders to close the gap between what their brand promises and what their product delivers — by treating them as one system.

A Practice For

Founders and product leaders who treat brand, behavior, and business as one problem — not three.

25 Years in Practice

From Silicon Valley product floors to civic platforms in twelve states.

∞×1 AI-Partnered, Human-Led

Research at scale, judgement at the table. The leverage of both.

02 · The Loop · Method

A four-phase loop,
compounding
over time.

Strategy without research is taste. Research without design is a deck. We close the loop by treating each phase as input to the next — and shipping automation so the loop runs without us.

Phase 01

Diagnose

We sit with the business problem before the design problem. Stakeholder interviews, market signal, and the uncomfortable questions nobody wrote down.

Interviews Audit Signal
Phase 02

Research

AI accelerates synthesis — clustering thousands of conversations, transcripts, and reviews into psychology you can act on. Humans still make the call.

Claude Tagging Ethnography
Phase 03

Design

Brand, system, and surface co-evolve. Every component is a hypothesis about behavior; every token is a business decision.

Figma Tokens Prototypes
Phase 04

Operate

We hand off pipelines, not PDFs. Automated content, tagging, and QA loops so the system compounds value after we're gone.

CI Storybook Playbooks
§ 03 How I work · A method, not a menu
Portrait
Niya C sisk
MFA
Illustrated portrait of Niya
FIG. 08 — THE PRACTITIONER — N.

I help purpose-driven leaders bring their vision together meaningfully.

My background was shaped inside Silicon Valley product teams, but my approach is deeply human: understanding how people make meaning, build trust, and adopt new behaviors over time.

The best outcomes I've delivered came from creating space — unhurried, thorough, deliberate — where the real problem could surface before anyone reached for an answer.

I bring research, systems thinking, and pattern recognition shaped inside some of the most demanding product environments in the world. I genuinely respect and appreciate the founders I choose to work with.

I choose deliberately. Because when I take something on, I care deeply about where it leads.

Niya Sisk brings to technology a background in cognitive psychology, storytelling, and human-centered design. Her writing explores psychology, color, AI, and technology adoption.

04 · Proof · In Other Voices

The work speaks best through the people who've been inside it.

“I didn't have to say anything. You intuitively knew the next most powerful thing — allowing us to see the psychological edge cases and really see the product in the wild.”

Amir Aliabadi Founder · Trippy AI

“Niya is a genius, she sees things in both a meta and micro capacity. A lot of creative people aren't detail-oriented. Niya is — and she makes everyone around her look good.”

Hilary Parker CEO · Habitat for Humanity

“She's been our designer since 2013. We trust her completely and know she will support our programs and team with the solutions that work with our evolving organization.”

Dir. of Research · Options for S. Oregon Heidi Herinckx, MS

“She delivers UX frameworks beyond what can be imagined in our own heads.”

Head of E-Comm, TinFsh · Lily AI Jared Garner
— Lineage —

Running with a good crowd — evolved from Silicon Valley roots.

Apple Adobe Microsoft McKinsey & Company eBay Oracle K&M Bill.com Lily AI Macromedia
05 · Selected Work · 2022 — 2026

Three engagements where strategy met the street.

Each project is the same shape: a business under pressure, a population under-served, and a decision to design for trust before traffic. The voices below belong to the people who actually used what we built.

№ 01 Trippy AI
2026

AI Knowledge Platform · Product Definition + Trust Architecture

Trippy AI: Redesigning trust formation for an AI-driven knowledge platform.

Trippy's core innovation — its Subject-Verb-Object knowledge system — was visually confusing and operationally unsustainable at scale. I redesigned the SVO architecture into an interactive filtering and trust-building system that automated backend media generation, reduced production friction, and transformed the card experience into a shareable artifact designed around how trust actually forms online.

Led product definition, sensemaker narratives, UX architecture, visual design, design systems, and engineering handoff across a three-month founder collaboration.

Stakeholder Research · Mental Models · SVO Architecture · Product UX · Design System · Engineering Handoff

№ 02 BILL
Multi-year

Financial Infrastructure · Vendor Payment Systems

BILL: Designing operational trust inside financial workflows.

Designed and shipped core UX architecture for vendor payments, audit systems, and financial workflow management across integrations including QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, and banking partners. Led cross-functional product strategy through wireframes, prototyping, and stakeholder alignment across complex operational systems still active in the platform today.

Financial UX · Workflow Architecture · Audit Dashboards · Product Strategy · Enterprise Systems

№ 03 Lily AI
Multi-year

AI Commerce Infrastructure · Enterprise SaaS + ML

Lily AI: Scaling AI-powered commerce systems for global retail.

Built and led Lily AI's first UX and research practice, creating a unified design system across the enterprise platform while partnering closely with product leadership on AI-driven tagging, predictive behavior modeling, and recommendation systems. Product design initiatives contributed to measurable revenue lift across major retail clients including Gap, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and thredUP.

AI/ML Systems · SaaS Architecture · Product Strategy · Design Systems · Research Leadership

06 · Notes · Writing & Talks

Speaking It Into Life.

Short essays, talks, and field notes from inside the engagements. Most of them are arguments I'm still having with myself.

All notes →
§ 07 Begin · A simple next step

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