SINCE 2024
Fora Travel
Director of Product Design
- SaaS-to-Consumer Range
- Design + Product Ownership
- People Before Company
- Research-Driven Simplification
Director of Product Design · Fora Travel · New York
Alex Daniels
New York, NY
Head of Design at Fora
Alex Daniels directs product design at Fora Travel, hiring the team and building the tooling its travel advisors use. They came to design sideways — an economics honors student and Citi analyst who managed Yext's platform-services team from 6 to 13 people, taught themselves design there, then became Head of Product and Design at Rainmaker, where they founded the companion game Survivor. Off the clock they race bikes, play League of Legends, and once trekked the Cambodian jungle.
- $100m+ACV his Yext platform team covered
- 6→13Yext team headcount he grew
HAPPENING NOW
STANDING TODAY
HOW THEY THINK4 BELIEFS
Four convictions carry a career that came into design sideways.
THE IMPACT
The proof, one pull-out at a time — enterprise SaaS, games, and the systems under both.
EVERYTHING ELSE · 7 WORKS
THE TIMELINE
How an economics analyst became a self-taught designer who lets users pick the simpler design.
The whole record, newest first – tap any moment and Aster tells the story.
2024–PRESENT
Building the design function at Fora
At Fora Travel, a platform out to empower 100,000 people to become travel entrepreneurs, Alex directs product design — hired as Lead Product Designer in March 2024 and promoted to Director that December. The mandate is tooling for travel advisors, built by a design team Alex is hiring, including former Rainmaker report Michael Cho, now a Staff Product Designer.
“Currently building out the design team at Fora to create best-in-class tooling for our travel advisors.”
2022–2024
Head of product & design across web3 and gaming
When web3 collapsed in 2022, Rainmaker stayed a gaming company and Alex — hired as Lead Designer under the CPO — became its product subject-matter expert and Head of Product and Design. Across the run: the web3 Content Site and Launchpad, then Challenges, Create a Challenge, and Survivor, the companion game Alex founded, designed, and shipped from ideation to beta in three months.
“Born from my own desire to make the game I love more fun.”
2019–2022
Turning enterprise SaaS into product-design craft
Alex moved from managing Yext's platform-services team into design as an IC, then into design leadership. They led the primary-navigation redesign — 20+ pages across five SaaS products — after roughly 20 customer interviews overturned an executive-endorsed draft, shipped the Reviews Workflow redesign to enterprise customers, and stewarded Yext's design system as its de facto product manager.
“We essentially re-learned the fact that 90% of Yext's customers are not power users.”
2016–2019
Leading platform services and people at a scaling startup
Alex's entry into tech: managing Yext's platform-services (technical account management) team through late-stage-startup chaos with minimal guidance. The team grew from 6 members to 13 and covered more than $100m in ACV — the people-leadership foundation for everything after, and where a 'people before company' management creed took shape.
“I believe it to be the most important part of any organization. At the end of the day, we all want to be seen and recognized for our work, and that starts with management.”
2010–2016
Economics honors and Wall Street analytics
Before design, Alex was an economics honors student — Phi Beta Kappa at Bowdoin, the Douglas Prize in Economics and the Noyes Prize in Political Economy, and captain of both the Alpine Ski and Cycling teams — then a Citi investment-banking analyst from 2013 to 2016. The numbers-first instinct behind ACV, retention, and mobile-mix reasoning starts here.