Hey, I'm Ilonah (uh-law-nuh)

Senior Product Designer specializing in trust, security, and platform systems. My work lives at the intersection of complex technical constraints and real user needs. At GitLab I design the permission and authentication infrastructure that enterprise teams depend on to stay secure and compliant.

Case Studies
Fine-Grained Personal Access Tokens
End-to-end UX for a new token permission model, resolving competing approaches through a 13-participant research program. Built for least-privilege security and AI agent use cases.
GitLab
2025
Custom Admin Role
Replacing an all-or-nothing admin model with granular permission controls for enterprise, reducing 250 overprivileged admins to industry standard.
GitLab
2024–25
Passkey Authentication
Designed MVC and led full feature for phishing-resistant login, enabling FedRAMP and SOC2 compliance for enterprise contracts.
GitLab
2024–25
Product Led Growth
Self-serve purchase flow for a developer platform, routing 100% of one account plan away from sales and contributing to a 25% reduction in customer acquisition costs.
Pantheon
2022
Domain Management
Self-serve domain workflow for a new site product, reducing connection time from 2 to 7 days down to an hour and removing a launch blocker for web teams.
Pantheon
2022

I spend my free time making ceramics, walking the city, eating my way through New York, and chasing my cat.

How I approach design

I design for trust. Permissions, authentication, access control, consent flows. The systems that determine what users can do, what they can see, and whether they feel safe doing it. As AI changes how products work, getting these systems right matters more than ever.

Before design I spent years in Business Operations and Finance. That background gives me an instinct for the business logic underneath a product decision. I move fast, I connect design to outcomes, and I use AI tools actively in my workflow to do both better.

How I got here

I studied Business Finance at San Francisco State University then pivoted into technology working for high-growth startups in operations and monetization. In 2020 I recognized how monetization programs can only scale with product partnership and went through a UX Design Bootcamp to develop those skills. I have worked as a Product Designer ever since, most recently at GitLab designing authorization, authentication, and access control systems.

I work best in ambiguous, high-stakes problem spaces where the scope is still being defined and the solution has to hold up across an entire platform.

🔨 Working on Fine-grained token permissions at GitLab
💭 Thinking about How AI agents will reshape permission systems
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