David Goligorsky is a technical and entrepreneurial Product Designer and Strategist. David works with startups and large organizations to help realize complex new ventures and innovations through Design. His approach balances culture & creativity with technology & commerce using methods learned at Stanford University's Product Design program and honed through program leadership at IDEO.
David is currently a Senior Staff Product Designer at Shopify, and is based in Stockholm, Sweden.
His superpower is converting ambiguity into concrete outcomes and strategic direction. As a cross-disciplinary system thinker he is an "expert generalist," quick to make unique contributions to new fields. David is an experienced leader of designers and engineers with a track record of building world-class teams in client services and a high-growth tech startup.
Before Shopify, David worked at Spotify. David had also partnered with entrepreneurs and leaders to help launch products and companies at places like IKEA, Sonder, Artsy, Octave, and MikMak. David was formerly Head of Design at Yieldmo, a high-growth digital media startup backed by Google Ventures and Union Square Ventures. His team of Designers and Engineers invented a unique and valuable portfolio of mobile advertising products that fueled a private marketplace for premium publishers and marketers navigating the shift to mobile.
David also worked at the global design and innovation firm IDEO across two tours of duty— most recently as a Senior Design Director focused on Digital in the New York studio. In his first four years at IDEO, David was a Senior Design Lead in the Cambridge studio. He has built and led teams in a breadth of work from detailed Engineering to future-forward strategy. His goal was to bring culture and character to client work and leverage emergent technologies and craft in the expression of Design. Key clients include Timberland, the United States Institute of Peace, Harvard University, Fidelity Investments, Bigelow Tea, Art of Shaving, American Heart Association, Sanofi-Aventis, and many others.
David is enthusiastic about product design & innovation methodology and empowering people to “make” and has lectured on the topic at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, and other institutions and organizations. He had co-founded an electric vehicle company (now called Local Motion, acquired by Zipcar in 2015) and worked in advanced technology R&D for the Department of Defense, applying “smart materials” to aero/mechanical systems including helicopters and hypersonic railguns.
David holds a MS in Product Design Engineering from Stanford University and a BS in Aerospace Engineering from Boston University. He loves factory tours, found art, self-help books, and esoterica.