My name is Chris Mendez. I’m a design leader who specializes in AdTech and AI. I’m currently VP of UX at TripleLift.
I suppose you could say I’m a lot of things. I’m a dad, a husband, a sports fan, a runner. I’m a part-time artist and landscaper, and a full-time TV and pizza enthusiast. But when it comes to who I am professionally, there are four things you need to know.
I have 14 years of UX experience.
My path into UX began while I was working as a copywriter and co-founding a startup from my apartment. That early experience taught me something important: good design isn't just about the pixels—it's about deeply understanding your market and users, and recognizing all the disciplines, within and beyond UX, that are needed to deliver a great experience.
Over the years, I’ve shipped products across a lot of different devices—laptops, tablets, smartphones, TVs—and have expanded my toolbox to include service design. I've been there for the 0-1 builds where you're figuring everything out as you go. I've also worked on mature platforms where every change needs to be surgical and strategic. I've done it at companies like TripleLift, VidMob and Ogilvy, and for clients and partners like Adobe, Amazon, Meta, Snapchat, Johnson & Johnson and American Express.
My approach has always been user-centered, but it has evolved over time. While I still spend time conducting formal studies, I increasingly find myself doing research in the field—working alongside sellers and account managers to not only generate insights and validate decisions, but also drive adoption and revenue. I have also expanded the scope of my research, having managed product, content and visual designers (and UX researchers themselves).
Central to my work is systems thinking. During my career, I have developed and managed several cross-channel design systems. As an enterprise-focused designer in an increasingly automated space, I believe having a strong UI foundation is critical to reducing time-to-market, increasing time-to-value and delivering innovation that’s approachable.
I have 14 years of advertising experience.
Just like my UX experience, my vertical expertise runs deep—and is unique in the sense that, before I started building software for marketers, I was a marketer myself. During my five years under the WPP umbrella, I experienced firsthand the workflows, pressures and frustrations that I'm now trying to solve. I deeply empathize with my users because some of them are friends and former colleagues.
In terms of pure AdTech experience, I've cast a wide net—designing both creative and media products, for buyers and sellers alike. I know how global brand strategies are formed and how cross-channel media plans are developed. I know how creative assets are produced and how they're served across the programmatic ecosystem. I know all the major functions of brands, agencies and publishers—and how they interact. It's not an exaggeration to say I've touched most of the campaign development lifecycle at this point.
As the industry continues to blend and consolidate, this holistic view of the market hasn't just been helpful—it's been necessary. It allows me to play a more strategic role compared to your typical head of UX. The companies I have worked at and the leadership teams I have worked with have consistently relied on me to define the vision and roadmap, and apply design thinking across the organization.
I have 8 years of AI experience.
In what almost feels surreal to say, I've been working with AI since 2016 and have applied it to a variety of advertising use cases. I've watched this technology evolve from early machine learning models to the sophisticated platforms we see today.
At TripleLift, I was hired to bring their first commercial-facing platform, for publishers and advertisers, to market—baking several AI features in from the very beginning. We use LLMs to allow curators to generate custom data segments with the drop of a brief. We use computer vision to detect the sentiment of CTV content, identifying the optimal placement for in-show ads. And in terms of our media offering, we use generative modeling to manipulate assets, so they can run across all of our web supply without a dip in quality.
At VidMob, I was the lone product resource on the early-stage team that expanded their offering beyond creative production to include AI-based creative analytics—to answer the age-old question, "what in my creative is driving performance?" To do that, we partnered with Amazon to dissect the anatomy of social and digital assets, then paired those tags with performance data to generate brand and normative insights. From talent diversity reports to proprietary format fitness scores, from best practice compliance tools to production- and analytics-based plugins for Adobe Creative Cloud, we leveraged AI not only to measure creative, but optimize it as well.
This combined experience has given me a strong sense of AI's strengths and weaknesses at any given time, allowing me to quickly diagnose when it should or should not be used. It has also given me a keen sense of what to expect in terms of the pace of advancement. This all translates to not only being able to design for AI, but confidently plan for it as well. (Well, as confidently as you can, anyway.)
I have 8 years of leadership experience.
To me, the term "leadership" encompasses a lot. It's about setting direction—the ability to drum up big ideas, speak the language of your audience to sell them, and rally large groups of people, under and beyond your purview, to achieve them. Having started my career at a company that built an entire house to win an IKEA pitch (no joke), I pride myself on the ability to think big and sell hard, without losing sight of reality.
It’s about setting a good example. My peak managerial achievement thus far was at VidMob, where I built a multi-layered team of 15 people, stretched across four disciplines and three continents. Despite the resources I had at my disposal, I never shied away from a whiteboard session or jumping into Figma. To me, in order to be a good UX leader, you need to demonstrate a genuine love for your craft and willingness to get into the weeds.
Most of all, it’s about developing talent. Though it seems almost ridiculous to say, to me, the goal of a manager should be to manage as little as possible. It takes the courage to hire people better than you and the grit to work through growing pains until they can operate autonomously. I strive to make the designers on my team feel empowered, because the best place to grow is from the driver’s seat.
I’m always looking to meet new people, so feel free to reach out.
Email / LinkedIn