Caleb Frost Sanderson

Summary

Product designer and design leader with nine years building a complex B2B SaaS platform, specializing in front-end implementation across web and mobile, design systems, and AI product design. I work hands-on across the boundary between design and code: building and maintaining the design system, collaborating directly with engineers, and contributing front-end code to keep what ships at a high bar. Much of my recent work is designing AI features people can actually trust, where the human stays in the loop to verify and correct what the model produces.

What I do best

• Front-end collaboration. Pairing with engineers, reviewing PRs for design fidelity, and contributing code to keep what ships aligned to the system.
• Design systems in code. Token architecture, Storybook, and the migration work that turns legacy styles into a system engineering can maintain.
• AI product design. Human-in-the-loop AI workflows that make model outputs transparent, editable, and trustworthy, rather than treating AI as a black box.
• Design leadership and research. Running a design function, building critique and research practices, and shaping product strategy.

Experience

Director of Product Design — Fulcrum (formerly Spatial Networks)

fulcrumapp.com, field operations and mobile data-collection platform · Mar 2017 to Present

Grew from Web/Front-end Designer (2017) through Product Designer, Senior, and Manager to Director (2024), on a platform used by roughly 6,500 organizations and 75,000 members.

• Leading a design-system modernization of the web app: audited three conflicting style layers (20+ ad hoc grays, duplicate color tokens, no spacing scale) and captured 144 design tokens as a single source of truth, now shipping as an engineering-ready migration.
• Co-own a Storybook-based web design system with engineering, building toward a design-tokens-to-CSS pipeline, and set the team standard that every designer reviews front-end PRs and contributes code. With engineering, I am shaping AI-assisted tooling that keeps AI-generated UI aligned to the system as generation speeds up.
• Designed an end-to-end mobile AI voice-to-form feature for field crews (aka FastFill Audio), including the trust layer that shows what the AI filled and lets users verify and correct it before saving. Used by about 1,100 field users.
• Designing a photo-based AI feature (aka FastFill Photo) that fills forms from a photo's contents, starting with text extraction and expanding to object and condition detection.
• Owned research and design for a conversational AI analytics feature (aka Data Insights) across an 18-month arc from discovery to beta: research with 20 customers, the navigation and component system, and front-end polish I implemented myself. It uses progressive disclosure to make the AI's reasoning and results legible, so non-technical users can judge whether to trust an answer. Adoption climbed sharply after the January 2026 beta, reaching roughly 250 organizations.
• Designed a cross-platform freehand sketching and markup tool for field records (aka Sketch Field), shipped to general availability on iOS, Android, and web. Scoped an oversized version down to a buildable one and wrote the spec engineering shipped from.
• Built the team's UX research practice, moving the company from ad hoc support feedback to structured studies (interviews, contextual inquiry, diary studies, usability testing), and equipped product managers and designers to run their own.
• Lead the team's critique, onboarding, and operating rhythms, and mentor designers through performance reviews, goal-setting, and biweekly 1:1s that have supported promotion.
• Authored a strategy, now under review with leadership, arguing that design-system investment accelerates AI-era development.

Earlier career

Creative Arts Director, West Bradenton Baptist Church · 2013 to 2016. Led volunteer creative teams; managed WordPress sites and designed marketing content in Adobe Creative Cloud, which started my path into front-end and design.

Adjunct Professor of Guitar, Oral Roberts University · 2008 to 2011.

Education

The Iron Yard (now the Suncoast Developers Guild), Front-End Engineering immersive · 2016 to 2017

Oral Roberts University, Bachelor of Arts, Music Performance · 2008

Community

Organizer of the Front-End Design Meetup (Tampa Bay, 1,400+ members) and co-organizer of the area's first Figma-sponsored meetup, hosting monthly events from 2018 until 2020.

Skills

Front-end: HTML / CSS / JavaScript, React, Git/GitHub

Design systems: Figma (admin, component libraries, variables/tokens), Storybook, design tokens, MUI

AI and tooling: AI-assisted design and development workflows, Figma Make, MCP-based workflows, Claude Code CLI, Cursor / VS Code, command line (bash/zsh)

Research and collaboration: customer interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, design critique, Jira, Confluence