Activate Vision Activate VisionBrand Intelligence Conductor Take Your Signal Quiz

Making a founder's vision 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.

Take the Signal Assessment Read the Little Essays
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.

Activate Vision brings emotional intelligence and intuitive wayfinding to products and brands.

Activate Vision is a brand intelligence practice. We make a company's positioning, voice, and messaging coherent enough that both people and AI models describe it accurately.

Brand intelligence Activate {your} Vision

02

Full Circle

Method

Strategy without research is taste. Research without design is a deck.

A four-phase engagement: Diagnose, Research, Design, and Activate.

01

Diagnose

A two-week discovery: stakeholder interviews, a communications audit, and market signal review, delivered as a written problem statement.

  • Interviews
  • Audit
  • Signal
02

Research

Both library and AI investigative research synthesis — clustering conversations, transcripts, and competitive edge data into psychology you can act on.

  • Claude
  • Tagging
  • Ethnography
03

Design

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

  • Figma
  • Tokens
  • Prototypes
04

Activate

A delivery of automation and custom design systems. QA loops so the system compounds value for the business and customer.

  • CI
  • Storybook
  • Playbooks

03

How I Work

METHODICAL + CREATIVE
Portrait

Niya C Sisk
MFA

Illustrated portrait of Niya
Fig. 08 — The Practitioner— N.

I help purpose-driven leaders express their vision meaningfully.

I help to cultivate emotional intelligence and trust architecture: the structural design decisions that determine whether someone believes what they're looking at, before they've decided whether they like it, helping founders de-risk product rollout. Engagements are scoped per project, for founder-led companies of 2–10 people at seed to Series A.

Early training as a design leader at Apple shaped a design approach I’ve carried throughout my career: understand the underlying problem deeply, make complexity feel intuitive, and design from the perspective of the person using the product. Whether designing mouse interactions at Kensington, financial experiences at Visa, local shopping at eBay, or products and systems for many health-tech and others, I’ve consistently brought that same discipline to the work—connecting human behavior, technology, and business goals to create experiences that feel both remarkably simple and purposeful.

I have bandwidth for 3 engagements per quarter to keep it focused, fun and impactful. I genuinely respect and appreciate the founders I choose to work with.

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 AliabadiFounder · 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 ParkerCEO · 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.”

Heidi Herinckx, MSDir. of Research · Options for S. Oregon

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

Jared GarnerHead of E-Comm, TinFsh · Lily AI

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

— Lineage —
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.

Three engagements: an AI knowledge platform, financial payment infrastructure, and AI commerce systems for global retail. In each, the work was product definition, UX architecture, and a design system handed off as working pipelines. The voices below belong to the people who 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

Little Essays

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 little essays →