Dustin Abarca
Business systems · product operations
I find where work catches between teams, tools, and people — then redesign the system so it stops catching there.
Usually the thing itself is fine. It’s the space around it that isn’t.
A portfolio is a small object.
The work is the system around it.
I design systems that help people work better. Technology is the medium — noticing where the work catches, and building something so it stops catching there.
The résumé lists where. This is how.
How the work goes
Most of it is looking closely at something everyone else has stopped seeing.
- Notice
The step people quietly work around, because complaining about it takes longer than just doing it again.
- Map
Who owns what, what hands off to what, and which seam has no owner at all.
- Clarify
Take out what isn’t helping and rebuild the next move so it’s obvious. Usually less system, not more.
How likely are you to recommend us?
Sent · never answered
The first problem was never the score. It was the silence.Plenty of customers never answered at all, so the picture leadership had was built from whoever happened to be annoyed enough to reply.
Complaints are anecdotes until someone builds the instrument that turns them into a number.
I implemented the Voice of Customer program, then designed the dashboards and the recurring KPI reporting that put it in front of executive leadership — CSAT, NPS, SLA, resolution time, backlog. Not so there’d be a chart. So there’d be a decision.
Requirements · configuration · UAT · training · executive reporting
The other half
The same instinct doesn’t switch off at six o’clock.
Systems at real scale, with real consequences, and a lot of people depending on the thing not breaking.
Whole things I own end to end — the idea, the product decisions, the interface, the cuts.
I’m not the engineer writing every line. I decide what should exist, design how it should feel, test it honestly, and use AI to build it faster than I could alone. The judgment is the work.
The job wasn’t to invent a persona. It was to make what was already there legible.
Jane is my wife. This was personal, but the discipline was real. She was the stakeholder and the subject of the brand; I translated who she already is into strategy, structure, experience, and the final digital expression.
A brand is a system too — identity, content, hierarchy, presentation. None of them work alone, which is why this sits in the same portfolio as the enterprise work.
Brand strategy · Experience direction · UX · Visual system · Editorial storytelling · Implementation collaboration
Belief before biography.
Question→Evidence→How she thinks→ Process→The person→Contact
Information architecture — a visitor should understand how she thinks before they read where she has worked
Underneath, every page has a job.
- HeroOpen with the question she actually works on — not a job title
- Selected workSix projects, standing as evidence for that question
- How I thinkThree beliefs, in her own voice
- Behind the scenesProcess, not polish
- About · CurrentlyThe person — last, once she’s already been understood
Editorial storytelling — what each page says, and what it leaves out
what makes people feel like they belong?
And the one that isn’t finished
Not everything I build works. That’s most of what I learned.
One thing. Today.
A recommendation is only worth anything if the path from seeing it to making it feels immediate. Every feature I added between the saving and the making turned out to be a feature in the way.
Still unsolved — the platforms won’t let the thing play where the decision gets made
So I built folders. Tags. Collections. Workflows. I got much better at organizing, and made about the same amount of work.
Barry is a personal creative tool I built to turn saved Instagram and TikTok inspiration into something I’d actually make. It’s named after my dog.This is what it was pointed at: everything I ever saved to make later. It started as an operating system for all of it — and more features never once made me create more.
Same move. Different room.
Three environments that look nothing alike. The discipline underneath is identical — and the only real difference between them is how many times the loop had to run.
Enterprise systemsSystems · operating modelSomeone at a door on day one, with every system reporting green. Four owners, one handoff belonging to nobody — and the redesign that made it a step the process can’t skip.
janeklee.comExperiences · experience strategyThe deliverable was a website. The work was the order. Sections resequenced so belief arrives before biography — and the person lands last, once she has already been understood.
Barry OSProducts · product judgmentEverything saved. Almost nothing made. Seven versions chasing the gap between seeing something and making it. The gap is still there.
The loop count is the honest difference. Process work lands once because the fix is structural. Product work loops, because the only way to find out whether an idea was right is to ship it and watch.
If something is harder than it should be, I’d like to look at it.
I’ve followed that same problem through enterprise systems, workflows, internal tools, products, brands, and websites. Different rooms. Same problem.
Usually the thing itself is fine. It’s the space around it that isn’t.