Gloria Murillo
Designing AI and digital products that hold up in real life.
Product leader with deep UX roots, focused on personalization, decision systems, and trust-sensitive AI.
Selected work
Selected work in AI, product design, and systems.
Sensory Sprout
A system for making dinner more reliable for families with selective eaters. Sensory Sprout models the sensory and situational conditions that shape whether a meal gets eaten.
Explore the case study →StoryJam
A collaboration tool designed to rebalance participation in distributed teams.
RefWorks
Migration and trust design for a global academic research platform.
The most interesting product problems aren’t about features.
They’re about understanding what actually determines whether something works in real life.
How I think under real constraints
Not a manifesto. Just patterns that have held up in ambiguous, trust-sensitive products.
Design for reality
Prototype with real conditions, test with real constraints, ship what survives contact with actual users and systems. The best product work looks simple because the hard thinking happened first.
Diagnose the real problem
Before designing anything, identify what’s actually blocking progress. The visible problem is rarely the real one. Diagnosis before you design.
Treat scope as a decision
Knowing what to leave out is as important as knowing what to build. Every feature added is a commitment maintained. Scope is a product decision.
Trust is structural
Trust isn’t a feeling — it’s an architecture. Transparency, control, tone, and safety boundaries have to be designed into the system, not layered on after.
AI needs judgment, not just enthusiasm
Separate layers by failure cost. Match each capability to the right technology. A missed allergen is not the same as a bad recipe suggestion.
How I work
I work best where product direction is still forming—when teams need clarity, not just execution. I’m usually most useful in the early stages: framing the problem, surfacing the real constraint, and helping the team decide what matters most.
My background in design keeps me close to users and interaction quality, while my move into strategy came from repeatedly stepping upstream to shape the problem before building the solution.
I work across disciplines with enough fluency to connect product, design, and engineering—and enough judgment to know where alignment, tradeoffs, or restraint matter most.
Let’s build something clear, trustworthy, and built to hold up in practice.
Product strategy, AI systems, and trust-sensitive design.
I’m open to roles where I can help teams frame ambiguous problems, make better decisions, and build systems that hold up in practice.