Available for New Roles & Projects
The online home & select works of Rhys Rabaiotti
Two decades shipping digital products in complex, regulated, high-stakes environments; Dyson, NatWest, medtech, and most recently Carwow. I take ideas from fuzzy problem to working software: strategy, design, prototype, and increasingly the build itself.
See: lullogram, a live App Store app I designed, built and shipped solo.
Hands-on product designer + design engineer
Previously Head of Product Design at a regulated medtech, now operating as a principal-level IC because I would rather ship the work than manage the meeting about it .
- AI-powered design & prototyping
- Design systems
- Native Mobile Apps
- Web App/SaaS
- UI & HMI Design
- Research & Strategy
Selected works
-
Marketplacecomparisonengine
An automotive marketplace comparison engine, designed to stand apart from the competition while surfacing the USPs only this platform can claim. One engine, two surfaces: SEO-indexable fixed pages and a freeform tool.
- Role
- Product Designer + Design Engineer
- Year
- 2026
- Contribution
- Research
- Functioning prototype
- Product design
- Prompt layer
-
AI-guidedrecommendations
The most confusing step in configuring a car, redesigned with an optional AI route: tell us what matters and we find the version that fits. Shipped live to three markets, measured properly, and read honestly.
- Role
- Product Designer + Design Engineer
- Year
- 2026
- Contribution
- Discovery
- UX + prompt design
- Content design & localisation
- Live experimentation
-
Nativemobilestrategy
The marketplace's app was a web wrapper: the website in a costume. I built the case for going native, in Swift, as working software. It helped secure the investment to rebuild the app natively.
- Role
- Product Designer + Design Engineer
- Year
- 2025
- Contribution
- Product strategy & concept design
- Native build (SwiftUI)
- Ownership features
- Stakeholder buy-in
-
Start-upco-founder
Co-founded a first-to-market app grading trading cards with AI from a phone camera. Trained on 600k+ real cards, ten-second grades, run as a live business, then sold. Still a user. Tags: Zero-to-one / AI model training / Live operations / Exit
- Role
- Product Designer + Design Engineer
- Year
- 2026
- Contribution
- Research
- AI model training data
- QA + live operations
- Business building
I work as a force multiplier across design, product and engineering. Clear framing, shared artefacts, early validation; less risk, faster decisions. I favour systems over one-off solutions, evidence over opinion, and clarity over superfluous polish.
I build. Working prototypes, robust experience systems, technical POCs and internal tools, often AI-assisted, always real enough to test. Working things beat a deck every single time.
- Senior Product Designer (Principal scope) @ Carwow2024-Now
- Independent Consulting2020-2024
- Lead Product Designer @ Blackfinch Group2021
- Head of Product Design @ Lemongrass Health2018-2020
- UX Design Manager @ RBS/Natwest2017-2018
- Senior UX Designer (apps + HMI) @ Dyson2016-2017
- Freelance · agency + early career2004-2016
Meet Rhys. Forever curious + seeking forgiveness over permission
rablab is really just me, Rhys Rabaiotti. A principal-level product designer and design engineer based in Cardiff, Wales. I have spent two decades making digital products in places where getting it wrong is expensive: banking, regulated medtech, connected hardware, and high-stakes consumer purchases.
How I got here…
I started in 2004 building Flash sites from a bedroom in Cardiff, which is a sentence that dates me precisely. Since then: agency years at Dare in Bristol and London, senior design at Dyson working on apps for physical machines, UX management at NatWest, and Head of Product Design at a medtech taking an AI diabetes platform through MHRA approval, where I led and mentored a team of twelve.
After that I went independent for four years, working at principal level across 31 products in six industries, including founding a start-up of my own. These days I am at Carwow, designing high-intent consumer journeys and AI-powered features across the UK, German and Spanish markets.
I keep choosing the messy, ambiguous, high-stakes problems.
The ones where the brief is a shrug and the answer has to survive regulators, engineers and real people having a bad day.
How I work + what I believe
I was a Head of Design once, and I chose to step back to the work itself. Principal IC suits me: close to the craft, trusted with the ambiguous stuff, and measured by what ships.
A working thing beats a deck.
The fastest way to align a team is to put something real in their hands.
Evidence over opinion.
Strong views should always be held weakly (until the research says otherwise).
Constraints are the brief.
Regulation, legacy systems and technical reality are not obstacles to great design; they are the material.
Craft is a form of respect.
For the user, and for the engineers who have to build it. Utilising a solid design system.
themakerbit
Somewhere along the way, designing stopped being enough. I wanted to ship the thing, not just describe it.
So now I build. Using AI-assisted development I take ideas past the prototype stage into working software.
The proof I am proudest of is lullogram, a sensory calm app for ADHD, autistic and overstimulated minds, live on the App Store and Google Play, designed, built and shipped solo. I have also built internal tools now used daily by product and engineering teams: a native haptics design tool, a usage-tracking menubar app, a local model powered closed captions tool and technical POCs that settle feasibility debates with running code instead of opinion.
Ten years ago this would have needed a team. Now it needs a designer who is willing to learn the tools and put the hours in. I did both.
WhatIdofromfive-to-nine…
When I am not on the clock, I can be found working on my passion project, lullogram. A mobile-first solution for ADHD, autistic and overstimulated minds.
- Product Design
- iOS & Android Builds
- Bespoke haptic engine
Want more? Check out my experiments, all available as working tools in TestFlight on iOS.
Tell me what you are working on. If it is a role, name the company and the shape of the job. If it is a project, one line on the problem is plenty. I read everything and reply to most.
Gotaprojectinmind?
Let's make something happen together