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We're excited to share that Ivy Lam has joined Motif as our Head of Design. Ivy comes to us from Retool, where she built and shipped an AI copilot from nothing to public beta in four months, giving people who aren't engineers a way to build the systems they need. Before that she led design at Cruise and Wealthfront, working across autonomous vehicles, fintech, and AI tooling.
At Motif, Ivy will lead our design organization, shaping how the product looks, feels, and works as we build a single workspace for design, visualization, and review. She'll partner closely with product and engineering to keep professional tools approachable for the people who actually use them every day.
What connects Ivy's work across such different fields is a habit of looking past the obvious problem to find who it's really for. At Cruise, she led design for autonomous vehicles through the hardest stretch the company faced. The technical problem was trust: how do you get someone to believe a car with no driver will keep them safe? The real problem was who that trust was for, the people the road had overlooked, who can't drive, can't afford a car, or live where transit never reached. At Wealthfront, it was financial advice for people who never had enough money to be worth an advisor's time. The domains keep changing. The design problem stays the same.
That's also what makes her a natural fit here. Ivy has never walked into a field as the resident expert, and she's learned to treat that as an advantage rather than a gap.
"This is the most excited I've been about a problem in a while," Ivy said. "I've never been the domain expert walking in, and I've learned that's often an advantage. You come in curious, asking the questions that help a whole team see the problem fresh. My curiosity has let me work in almost any domain, but it keeps returning to one place: where digital meets physical, where a decision in software changes something real for someone who wasn't in the conversation. That's what drew me to Motif. Building tools for the people who design the physical world, and opening up creative work that's been locked behind expert-only software."
We're thrilled to have Ivy on the team.
