About

Design Leadership · Creative Technology · Product Strategy

My name is Francis Phan and I'm a product design leader, creative technologist, and music producer with diverse experience building and scaling design organizations across consumer products, creative tools, and complex technical platforms. I specialize in building products that inspire and empower creators.

Francis Phan, Head of Design, creative technologist and music producer — Francis Phan, product design leader, creative technologist, and music producer

Background

Currently serving as the Head of Design at Splice, a music creation platform and marketplace, I lead product design for a complex ecosystem of creative tools. I began my career as a C++ software developer, building the first-generation reverb plug-in for Cakewalk and working as an early developer at Harmonix Music on "The Axe," a precursor to the Rock Band video game phenomenon. I was also the founding CTO at SonicBids, where I helped develop the Electronic Press Kit (EPK). My innovation and technical mindset have earned me wins at hack competitions, including Boston's Music Hack Day and MIT's Semantic Web Hack Competition in the late 2000s.

Before Splice, I was a Director of Product Design at Yahoo/Verizon Media, where I led design across a multi-billion dollar platform and managed a large portfolio of product formats at scale. My contributions are underscored by patents for interactive video and rendering algorithms.

Education

I hold a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Connecticut and an MS in Biomedical Engineering from Rutgers University, where my graduate research focused on psychoacoustics, neural networks, digital signal processing, and speech recognition.

Mentorship

Passionate about mentoring the next generation of product designers, I'm a founding industry adviser to Rutgers University Innovation Design Entrepreneurship Academy (IDEA), which provides students with practical product and design thinking training. I've also served as lead and HBCU recruiter for the Yahoo Design Associate Program.

Music

In the music world, I made my impact as a producer in Boston's socially conscious music scene during the 2000s. I co-founded The Jugganautz and earned the New England Urban Music Awards "Producer of the Year," hosted by Berklee College of Music. My collaborations include notable artists like Iyeoka Okoawo, David Franz, Omega Red, Kishi Bashi, and Clinton Sparks. I'm currently working on a broad span of electronic music projects.