tien · shiang · tsai
Tianxiang Cai 蔡天祥
Nomad in Beijing, New England, Shanghai, now based in Seattle. I’ve gone by “Dave” in English since I was five. Either name works.
About
Product Designer in Seattle ⛰️
Pushing pixels and shipping the end-to-end experience.
i’m dave.
Product
Growth
DyneryPay
4.0K
App installs
2×
MAU, Sep → Oct
3×
Payment volume MoM
2.1K
Monthly actives
34%
Week-1 activation
92%
Bills split by item
Fun facts
Ultra marathon runner · DJ · Coffee and craft beer enthusiast
Seattle, WA · 2026
👋
TL;DR:
,
0
Oscars
(yet),
one
from
Elon.
A
Happy
Meal
campaign,
as
the
intern
doing
PM,
research
&
design.
:
helps
connect
5,000+
foodies
&
50+
restaurants.
2026,
a
,
marathons
on
three
continents,
&
a
lot
of
.
CAPABILITIES
Skills
more than pretty rounded rectangles
Product management
Where design meets strategy
Turn ambiguity into a roadmap
Align stakeholders before build
Cut scope without losing the point
Ship, measure, decide what’s next
Illustrated by Atlassian
User research
Evidence before opinion
Watch people fail, don’t just ask
Turn interviews into direction
Test concepts before we commit
Bring evidence to roadmap fights
Coding
Fluent with engineering
Build the front end, not just spec
Hand off in the engineers’ language
Catch feasibility issues early
Use AI for the parts past my depth
prototyping
Turning ideas into reality
Make it real before arguing for it
Settle debates slides keep alive
Paper, Figma, Arduino, or Unity
Put a testable thing in their hands
business strategy
Driving business performance
Argue for the work in budget terms
Own the launch’s success metric
Tie design calls to go-to-market
Turn analytics into the next bet
How I got here, and how I work
I came up through video, and it still shows
A high-school English assignment sent me down a Final Cut Pro rabbit hole, and a decade of video, motion, and VFX followed. At Tesla I co-produced 13 films that went on to reach more than 5 million views.
That decade isn’t a fun fact on my résumé. It’s why I think about products the way an editor thinks about a cut: what does someone need to see before they’ll care?
Last year that instinct fixed something real. Dynery’s onboarding was clean, fast, and quietly starving activation, because we asked people to build a profile before we’d shown them anything worth building it for. The fix wasn’t better craft. It was establishing before asking.
Beijing(2000)
Tesla (2021)
UW MS HCDE (2024)
What I’m like to work with
I own the miss.
I designed Dynery’s onboarding in 2025, watched it underperform, and rebuilt it in 2026 against my own decision. Read the onboarding case.
I stay with the work until it ships.
On DyneryPay I owned the monetization logic, the shared-bill permissions, and the privacy calls, not just the screens, and stayed on it through production. I’m most useful when the product decision, the interface details, and delivery stay connected. Read the DyneryPay case.
I go deep too early.
Given a problem with a lot of edge cases, I’ll over-explore before the decision is settled. So I state the decision we need to make first, time-box the exploration, and lead reviews with the recommendation instead of the reasoning.
How I build
judgment is the job
My title says designer. In practice my PM routes production front-end through me: I use Claude Code to scale Dynery’s 350+ component design system and to produce React Native, then take it through my own QA before it reaches engineering.
Generation is the easy part. The job is catching what it gets wrong, so I encoded a provenance, token, state, and accessibility audit into the agent itself, gated before handoff.
Design for humans
not the trend cycle
We’re three years into the AI gold rush, and most products are bolting a language model onto something and calling it innovation. I work on an AI product. The question I come back to every time is whether the AI is solving a problem here, or just performing innovation.
I’d rather ship a slower, considered feature that earns trust than one that wears this season’s vocabulary.
Beyond design
You can find me…
I studied Digital Media & Design at UConn. Some of that work, on mental health and freedom of expression, was recognized at international human rights forums.
These days: half marathons (1:47 PR), DJing electronic music, film photography, and trail running the Pacific Northwest.
Come and say hi.
I always love talking with humans, especially in the age of AI.
