Shane Fontane / How I got here
How I got here
The start
Music and community
01
Design was how I gathered people around an idea—and made it real.
In high school, I spent every day in graphic design class learning Photoshop. I printed posters and T-shirts to promote the music I was producing and DJing.
In New York City, I found a creative circle. We organized parties at nightclubs. Soon, I co-founded a booking agency to represent our DJ friends locally and internationally.
That became Parade ATW, a nightlife site covering the NYC scene through interviews, essays, event photos, forums, and work from writers, photographers, videographers, and on-camera personalities.
Doors opened
Vonage
02
Party flyers became proof.
First design role in tech
After a major family shift, I applied to a roughly 30-person Series A startup with party flyers and early agency work. That night, Vonage hired me as its first designer. From Series A through the IPO, I worked on every sales, fundraising, and marketing presentation. Vonage was my school, and I attended for six years.
Help Each Other
San Rafael
03
Making things kept changing what seemed possible.
A question on the train
On the commuter train home from New York City, I daydreamed about a life where I wasn’t chasing paychecks across state lines.
The first idea—someone paying to live vicariously through me—couldn’t scale. A simpler idea could: many people contributing a little to help someone else do something that mattered.
That became Help Each Other, the crowdfunding startup I co-founded. Building it brought me to San Rafael, California in 2008.
Raised$150K
Experimentation
Optimizely
04
Building A/B testing tools.
At Optimizely, I led the design of Full Stack from zero to one—an experimentation product for developers. I went on to lead design for Program Management, then Growth. Across that work, I learned what it takes to build a culture of experimentation.
2016–2020 / Optimizely / Staff Product Designer
Leadership
Grammarly
05
Eventually, the opportunity became something I could create for others.
At Grammarly, I grew Growth Design from one person to six product and content designers, hiring for complementary strengths and organizing ownership around three parts of the journey.
Growth Design1 → 6Product + content designers
- AcquisitionWebsite
- ActivationOnboarding
- MonetizationUpgrades and checkout
06
How this shaped how I lead.
- SupportShow up for each designer in the way they need, whether that’s coaching, critique, education, or removing blockers.
- OwnershipGive people enough runway to develop and execute their own point of view, rather than just implementing yours.
- High barStay close enough to the work to help raise craft and quality, including being in the pixels and bringing in outside perspective when useful.
Most recently
Atlassian
07
I led design for Atlassian’s Growth Web Platform.
I designed how Atlassian personalizes the journey from a first website visit through sign-up and onboarding. In parallel, I worked with partners on an AI-assisted authoring system meant to give Performance Marketing and Content Producers direct control over creating and updating web content, with agents and models taking on work that would otherwise require engineering.
- 01AI-assistedCONTENT PRODUCERS / PERFORMANCE MARKETERS
- 02PersonalizationFIRST VISIT / RETURN VISIT / SIGNED-IN
- 03ActivationSign-up / onboarding / growth
I’m grateful for this story, for every opportunity it opened, and excited to keep going.