Matt Wood

Matt Wood is a Texas native, now a Los Angeleno, an avid soccer fan, and a product strategist and designer.

Matt worked on the Google Shopping design team before leaving to found Arsenal, an entrepreneurial digital studio based in California. Together with his partners at Arsenal, he strategizes, designs and builds digital products, services, and experiences for a variety of businesses in a variety of industries.  Matt and Arsenal's skills and services range from early phase product strategy to user experience, interaction, and visual design for sophisticated interfaces, to full-stack web and mobile application development.  You can visit their website here or view their portfolio here. 

Arsenal has worked extensively with Google (on the Shopping Express product), MTV, Martha Stewart, Disney, Jamba Juice, Verizon, BestBuy, Hilton, and more.  Paypal Labs relied heavily on Arsenal to help them conceive of and design the future of Paypal's product offering.

Outside of technology, Matt is also an accomplished musician; he played jazz piano professionally and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His scoring and songwriting work has been featured on national broadcast television and nominated for an Emmy award, a GLAAD award, an Austin Songwriter's Group Song of the Year Award, and the New York Musical Festival.

I'm a founding partner at Arsenal, a design/development agency in Los Angeles, where I lead the strategy and design practice for large clients like Google, PayPal, and BMW as well as small start-ups looking to us for strategy, design, and MVP development help. I also co-lead Arsenal Labs, our product incubator. Before that, I worked at Google, worked with Possible/Schematic and Sapient Nitro in Los Angeles, and started a few businesses. Much of my design work focuses on information architecture, UX design, and UI design of data-driven web and mobile applications. More and more, though, I find myself helping clients with early-phase product strategy – depending on the project, acting as a combination of design manager, creative director, and product manager. I have appeared in The New Yorker and The Guardian in relation to my work.

I live in Los Angeles but spend a lot of time in Austin, TX. I'm originally from Austin – a place where it's easy to end up with a background in music and film, which I also have and will happily chat about. 

Arsenal Inc. | 2013 - Present
Managing Partner

Google | April 2012 - April 2013
UX Designer

Magnet Systems Inc. | Dec 2009 - Dec 2011
Lead User Experience, Interaction Designer

Hippo Media Group | Aug 2007 - Dec 2009
Principal

"Matt and team go the extra mile in bringing designs to life. Their hands-on, iterative and practical approach make the process of going from very rough and unstructured requirements, to early wireframes, to high fidelity mocks a breeze."

—Brandon Trew, Product Manager, Google Shopping Express

"Matt and his team were awesome to work with.  They took my ideas in the roughest form - basically a word cloud of things I wanted the brand and UI/UX to convey - and they turned it into a very clean, crisp, and inviting look that exceeded all my expectations.  They were responsive and timely with honest feedback and I actually enjoyed our little virtual 'syncs'.

The way that the team worked was very efficient and very professional.  Where I think that professionalism truly shined was the final stages.  The first few 'syncs' with mock-ups took longer to get through with more comments from our team and requests and suggestions from us.  But it was obvious that they were taking detailed notes, because every subsequent meeting and every subsequent design had already taken our previous comments and criticisms into account.  By the end, I am absolutely positive that they knew what I wanted before I did!

I'm still waiting for the final deliverables but I've been integrally involved in the process and seen the mockups at every stage of the game.  I absolutely LOVE what they've crafted for us and can't wait to show it to the rest of the world!"
- Jason King, Heel App