I’m a generalist. I’ve led teams, shipped products, and worn nearly every hat—interaction, visual, research, prototyping, product, even code. I’m great at finding clarity, connecting dots, and keeping momentum. I lean on fast, efficient research to unblock decisions and speed up iteration.
I work best close to the team, shaping product vision, building systems, and clearing the path so others can do their best work. I’m curious, collaborative, and relentlessly optimistic about what great teams can build.
At Copper, I’m the VP of Design, leading the product design team and contributing to company strategy. I focus on building AI-enhanced CRM tools that automate busywork and simplify complex workflows. From sales to project management, we’re rethinking how small businesses manage relationships and get work done. I also help shape the roadmap and guide cross-functional execution to keep us aligned with customer needs.
I joined Podium as a Principal Designer and was later promoted to VP of Design, leading both the Product Design and Brand teams. Podium helps local businesses connect with their customers through messaging, marketing, and review tools. I played a key role in evolving the product into an AI-powered platform and led design across core messaging, mobile, and started a new design system. My work helped shape a more scalable, accessible product for small businesses across industries.
An inspiring and empathetic leader, I had the privilege of working with Adam as he led the brand creative and product design team at Podium. Always considering the end user, customer or audience at hand, he led an instrumental rebrand to reposition Podium during the height of AI.
Adam worked hand-in-hand with executive leadership to bring high level visions to life within excelled timelines, while mentoring the team to deliver impactful direction and business-minded context. Adam is truly a rare design leader that anyone would be privileged to work with!
I had the opportunity to work closely with Adam during his time at Podium, and I consistently saw the impact of his strategic thinking and exceptional ability to drive alignment. His talent extends beyond crafting exceptional designs, he advocates thoughtfully for design at every level, bringing teams and executives together around a shared vision.
Adam's greatest strength, however, is how he elevates those around him. He leads with genuine care and generosity, always sharing knowledge and helping others grow. He approaches challenges with curiosity, consistently asking insightful questions and grounding his decisions in clear, thoughtful principles.
Above all, Adam is an impact player. He brings energy, momentum, and clarity to every challenge, shaping better products and stronger teams. I'd jump at the chance to work with him again, and any organization would be lucky to have him.
I had the privilege of working with Adam Torres at Podium, where his design leadership consistently elevated our team and product outcomes. Adam has world-class design craft and can digest complex information, make thoughtful decisions, and execute with incredible speed and precision. He has a talent for developing novel solutions that others miss, and he knows exactly when and how to set design strategy that drives real results.
What really sets Adam apart is his ability to influence stakeholders toward better outcomes for both the business and users. His leadership style is steady, human-centered, and creates an environment where collaboration and critical thinking thrive. He provides unwavering support to his team while fostering the kind of psychological safety that brings out everyone's best work.
Adam also has a remarkable ability to gain executive buy-in. He speaks the language of business impact without compromising on user-centered principles, making him an invaluable bridge between design vision and organizational goals.
Any organization would be more than lucky to have his strategic thinking, design excellence, and leadership on their team.
Senior Product DesignerI had the pleasure of working both alongside and under the leadership of Adam at Podium. Adam’s leadership was instrumental in placing a strong emphasis on design and user experience within the company. His efforts led to a holistic view and attention to design and UX issues, ensuring our platform maintained a high standard of quality.
Adam is exceptional at explaining his design decisions, making complex ideas easy to understand. His initiative to address UX issues ensured we never had a backlog of design problems. Personally, he has been a great mentor to me, offering valuable feedback and critiques that have greatly enhanced my own design skills.
What truly sets Adam apart is his empathy and teaching ability. He is not only highly skilled in design and prototyping but also incredibly supportive and inspirational. Working with Adam has been a transformative experience, and I have immense respect and admiration for his contributions to our team and organization.
As the Principal Product Designer at Apollo, I get the opportunity to work on GraphQL development tools and cloud services. My responsibilities range from establishing a product design discipline to getting our design system off the ground. Additionally, I work closely with my colleagues to improve our product development processes, and of course, design web interfaces.
I've worked with Adam for just over a year now. Adam has helped me grow professionally and personally with his amazing attitude and general aptitude for understanding business and life.
Adam quickly learned the current and future business needs of Apollo and redesigned our entire information architecture. This means he's reimagined how we can use what we have to deliver the most value to our current customers and how we can provide solutions to our future customers. This is all in addition to actually building out designs to improve the look, feel, and behaviors of our entire platform. Adam has done all of this in one year while being the only designer at Apollo; also working with our marketing, sales, developer experience, and open source teams.
On a personal note, Adam has been a great mentor on being a new father in helping me understand effective mental approaches to difficult situations.
Adam is a great designer and a great person.
Besides being a fantastic person to work with, Adam brings with him a rich and broad set of skills. He has a thoughtfulness and compassion for users every step of the way, whether doing deep user research, product feature design, or building out a company-wide design system, Adam's sensibilities are always rock solid.
I appreciate his attention to detail and diligent product skills which have really elevated our software platform. He also has a great respect for technical considerations and engineering trade-offs, which makes him a very engineering-friendly designer to work with.
Adam is a person I wouldn't hesitate to put at the center of any design team large or small.
You will be very lucky if you get the chance to work with Adam. In his time at Apollo, he not only clearly elevated the quality of our core product but also our product development processes and our team's members.
If he's working on something, you know that what he produces will be high quality and well thought through and that you don't have to worry about it, which is honestly very nice. Adam knows what good product development looks like. He set up the company's design system, which is now used across all web properties. He's well versed in design methodologies. He has excellent taste and a strong intuition for what visually feels good in a product.
Adam and I worked closely together to lead several large initiatives at Apollo, including setting the company up with a mature user management and billing system. He researched, designed, and outlined all the work that we'd need to do to make it happen, and he partnered with engineers on my team to understand what was possible and what was not.
From an engineering perspective, he's the ideal product partner to lead a project with. He fully understands engineering constraints. He participates in technical discussions and gets along well with engineers. He even jumps into the code to help out with CSS work and review PRs for folks.
In addition to all that, Adam is extremely empathetic and knows how to make people feel comfortable and build good team rapport. He's an excellent sounding board and has helped to mentor and provide advice to many folks on our team on things that range far beyond their design sensibilities to their careers as a whole.
As a Sr. Product Design Manager at Slack, I’m focused on design process development, hiring, and people management. I often find myself playing a number of different roles as a Product Design Manager, such as mentor, friend, bearer of bad news, career advisor, and proud colleague. Additionally, I work cross-functionally to develop and implement aspects of our evolving product development process. On the product side, I partner with Product Management on product direction, priorities, and execution.
If I had to sum up Adam in a few words it would be hard-working, honest, reliable, compassionate, and funny. I could turn to him to work out design problems and respect and trust his feedback, but I also learned so much about myself and my working style.
Adam is one of the most genuine and empathetic people I’ve ever worked with and without a doubt made me a better person and employee through his time here at Slack.
At a team level, he was able to build and sustain a very close-knit group of people and become a model manager for other teams at our company. On a personal level, being a female in tech can sometimes be quite challenging, but he was always there to listen, support, and escalate any issues that came up. I think that level of reliability and open-mindedness are “must-have” skills for any managers I have in the future.
Adam is one of my favorite and closest partners at Slack!
Adam ran the Core Product design team and I reported to him as the design lead. Adam obsessed about the pixels as much as he cared about every designer on the team. Design is hard in general but especially on the “core product” where every feature change was scrutinized and feedback poured like spring water down a 2000 feet waterfall. He was there to coach us through all the ups and downs.
Under Adam, the design team(s) bonded and flourished across San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, and New York. It was an exerted effort to invest in culture, camaraderie, and most importantly a joy of working.. especially to have sense of humor under pressure.
Adam is honest. He is a great designer to collaborate with and he is also the manager you’d go to commiserate failures as well as celebrate wins. He has a way of telling me that I’m being an idiot (which happened a lot) and come off totally fair. Nor he would hesitant to go to bat for what he believed was right… and always managed to navigate difficult situations with so much grace.
Most importantly.. he taught me you can get a side or tortilla for free with your order at Chipotle.
My role as the Senior Lead Designer and sole designer in the Research and Development team involved being a user researcher, visual designer, interaction designer, and product thinker across all projects in the Research team, of which there were many at one time.
As a designer, Adam’s contribution to our research team was essential; his clarity of thought around design practices was vital to every step of our process. With Adam’s guidance, our team dropped frustratingly ineffective brainstorming practices for more intentional design thinking methods, like internal design sprints and going to customers as early as possible in the innovation process. And with our projects launching from solid, customer-focused foundations, Adam’s visual design gave the prototypes a clean, focused look that really let the core innovative ideas shine through.
Adam brings an uncanny inquisitiveness and clarity of thought to everything he touches. With Adam in the room, you quickly learn that just going with the flow will never be good enough. He will start by asking why things work a certain way, and then through clear, collaborative interrogation of the issue, the team can explain its goal/hypothesis alongside the focused plan to achieve/test it. He even brings the same curiosity to his coworkers, helping me as a friend to interrogate my professional capabilities and goals so that I can figure out my own superpowers.
Adam is a team player with intention behind every decision he makes. Well thought out decision making in his design and his management skills make sure customer and employees have an outstanding experience.
It was an honor working with Adam and I hope to again in the future.
I started at Palantir as a Product Designer and quickly moved to a Product Design Lead role where I lead projects and people working on many different products. In such a dynamic role, I found myself playing the typical generalist designer role where I created and led the first design initiated project to become an official engineering project. As a manager, I found myself playing the mentor, friend, bearer of bad news, career advisor, and proud colleague.
Adam is an excellent product designer. He has the perfect blend of logic, creativity, and systems-thinking — and his empathetic ability and communication skills are incomparable.
This blend of talent and ability also makes him a truly excellent manager. He engenders a deep sense of trust, acknowledgement, and attentiveness with the people he leads, borne from a strong sense of personal and professional responsibility to care for —and elevate— those around him.
I can’t wait to work with Adam again, and would do so at any opportunity.
Even among several brilliant design contributions to our project, I think the best thing he ever did was inspire me to really see the importance of great design. Adam continues to be one of the best people I've ever worked with, even as I meet new people and see new things.
I'll never forget the things I learned from working with him, and they will always be a part of the foundation of how I do my work.
Have you ever worked with someone that you trust so completely that you yourself feel elevated and empowered in their presence? That is Adam to me. Adam the professional, the enabler, the fuel to the flame.
In addition to be kind and charming, Adam is expert in everything from design research to interaction design to visual design to communication and collaboration to design process. Adam solved more problems for me than I could possibly count. Every conversation was a eureka moment.
If you are in the absolute privileged position of working with Adam, give him the reigns. He will steer you right. And, Adam, I sincerely hope that I have the opportunity to work with you again.
Principal Product DesignerAdam is an AMAZING designer.
His nose for design craft/execution is impeccable, but he doesn't lose the forest for the trees—his thoughts on product vision and strategy are insightful, and he's shaped and reshaped how we think about many critical projects at Palantir. Adam is also an excellent source of mentorship and critique, and a beloved lead.
He leaves a permanent impact on Palantir's products, processes, and people, and will be sorely missed.
He is an awful golfer, though, and lacks self-awareness of this weakness. Please do not consider him for any golf-related position.
Adam is the rare mix of charisma, empathy, process-awareness, and IxD instinct that brought our software design team together at a very formative stage.
Three specifics that stand out the most to me:
Just right amount of process: Adam is extremely quick to identify if projects have too much/little process. This goes beyond being a good practitioner of Agile or Scrum; he was selective and tailored parts of these tools as we needed them. Adam proactively coordinated getting our developers, quality engineers, and designers on a unified system.
Instincts for a new information architecture: One of Adam’s super-strengths is developing the right Information Architecture for complex applications. Long before anyone else on the team, Adam was able to articulate how our app had outgrown our IA and proposed a new one. This new IA has also been adapted by other projects.
I reported directly to Adam. Adam never felt like a manager, always a colleague and friend. His leadership empowered me to make good decisions on my own, while he was there to help unblock difficult situations.
I truly hope I can work with Adam again.
As a Senior User Experience Designer, I collaborated closely with engineers, product managers, and fellow designers to elevate the user experience of GoToAssist, GoToMyPC, and worked on concepts for a brand new GoToMeeting experience. My work spanned across many platforms including the web, desktop (Mac & PC), mobile.
I had the pleasure of working with Adam at Citrix between 2011 and 2013. Adam is not only a great interaction designer, but he is an excellent visual designer and front-end developer. He deeply understands design and software development.
He thinks about the customer or end-user always and as a result his work is elegant, thought through across all platforms and delightful. He works well with engineers, product teams and senior stakeholders.
I could easily recommend Adam for numerous reasons: He has multiple areas of design expertise, a substantial and rigorous academic background, an awesome personality, and a Dr. J approved hook shot. But many other folks have discussed those qualifications at length, so I won't.
He consistently goes far beyond simply "good enough" because he is internally driven to create outstanding user experiences that delight people. Here's why I recommend Adam: I recommend Adam because he loves design as a craft. He is a craftsman. He cares deeply about details that many other designers don't even see. Every screen, every transition, every pixel.
Working with a craftsman like Adam is truly a pleasure and an inspiration.
Adam has single-handedly changed the course of non-user centered and development-driven projects on numerous occasions.Adam is a tremendously talented experience designer with skills ranging from UX research and design, to product ownership and front-end development. Most of all however, he is a problem-solver.
Adam has a solid academic background in HCI and has a unique way of approaching his projects with a holistic perspective. His wonderful design sensibilities and technical acumen allow him to bring his vision to life.
He also truly understands the importance of the mobile landscape and its opportunities, especially with products on the iOS platform.
Overall, Adam’s inquisitive nature, genuine passion for creating compelling experiences, and work ethic are second to none. He is a committed team player, dependable, and detail-oriented; not to mention driven and yet incredibly humble.
Adam never ceases to amaze. Time and time again he has proven his ability to not only design visually and functionally compelling products but he consistently goes above and beyond by setting the standards by which these things are accomplished. From establishing design patterns to discovering new intuitive ways of solving problems, Adam can always be counted on. In addition to his UX Design skills, his knowledge of front-end and back-end coding allows him to consistently rise above the rest.
I constantly sought Adam's counsel and review during my projects. His intimate knowledge of Mobile design helped us pave the way for our mobile apps at Citrix Online. He is a great teacher and often challenged me and others to think differently about how to approach a solution.
Adam's great sense of humor and constant need to challenge the status quo made for some very fun discussions during our time working together. I could always count on very engaging and insightful conversations when talking shop with Adam. I will REALLY miss that. Adam was also a great friend and I wish him the best in the future. I hope that we get to work together again in the future!
In my time working with Adam, I was always impressed with how completely he could see the design problem at hand, how he always kept his focus on the users needs, and how well he was able to communicate those needs (and their reasons) to stakeholders.
Adam is a brilliant and passionate designer. He brings an energy and dedication to the craft that few people can match.
Adams attention to detail is impecable. I believe it's his passion and love for the craft that drives this, regardless, when Adam creates something you can be sure every detail will be accounted for and the result will be beautiful.
Adam is a great designer, he was also a great person to work with. When we were working closely on projects together I always looked forward to work. Working with Adam always made you think, made you laugh, and helped you produce the best work you could.
