Chelsea
Luna Mangold-Takao
Staff Product Designer
Chelsea LunaMunich, DE
Chelsea
“Chelsea exemplifies what the most senior design IC leaders should look like today: strategic, technically fluent, close to the work, and capable of turning ambiguity into clear, ambitious product solutions.”
“‘Staff Designer’ doesn’t begin to describe her adequately. She’s got a great sense of people and how to tell a story which inspires leadership to green-light a project; she’s also able to follow through on a practical level to ship and iterate.”
Work at Goodnotes
2021 — 2026Five years at Goodnotes, used by 25 million people every month. I’ve moved across new products, B2B, strategy, and growth, usually with the same job: find the problem worth solving and get the right thing shipped.
Turning research into product direction
Goodnotes wanted to understand an entirely different kind of customer. I led the research, surfaced the opportunity, and turned the findings into a direction leadership could plan against.
Read on TechCrunch (opens in a new tab)
Layers: Making the too-big idea small enough to ship
A valuable idea had stalled because the obvious version was too large to build. I found the smaller version that could answer the same product question, made it tangible, and worked with a staff engineer and our EM to get it into production.
See it on the Goodnotes blog (opens in a new tab)Planner with Calendar Integration: Prototype, specs and tooling with AI
I used AI three ways: a prototype on real calendar data that sold the idea to leadership, the design specs, and a tool that cut a 474-page planner build to under a minute.
See it on the Goodnotes blog (opens in a new tab)Finding leverage in surprisingly small moments
I led activation for consumers and business users, from the first app open to the first week. I set the strategy, then designed and tested the changes that shipped. They lifted activation, and some challenged what we believed about cutting friction.
Case study coming soon (password protected)
From notetaking to learning platform
I led the move from notetaking to studying in Goodnotes. Students were already hacking the app to test themselves, so our new team built what they were missing: a whole set of study tools grounded in learning science, including the app’s most-used learning feature.
Across the org
2021 — 2026-
Hackweek wins that shipped
Four hackweek wins, tied for the second most at Goodnotes. A toolbar redesign (opens in a new tab) later shipped; another win became the Validation Labs team I led.
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A pattern other teams build in
I saw that several teams would need a sidebar in document view, so I led the cross-team design of one shared component. Study tools (opens in a new tab) came first, AI chat (opens in a new tab) moved in later.
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Designers shipping code
The first designer-coded experiment in the production iOS app, paired with a staff engineer and creating a precedent for designers working closer to implementation.
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A sprint that became a playbook
Invited by the CEO to the first design sprint in London. I wrote the playbook; three more sprints ran on it across London and Hong Kong.
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Nominated by peers, awarded by leadership
“Win Like A Sports Team”, a company award given once a year for collaboration, trust and helping others do their best work.
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Turning reporting into shared infrastructure
The monthly experiment report for leadership and the company became a repository anyone could branch, reuse and extend, with automations through MCP.
And as a player-coach
Managed designers and researchers across different teams over the years · hiring manager for 5 hires, from job description to offer · two promoted · coached one from feature design into growth · on almost every design interview as the team grew from 4 to 30
Before Goodnotes
2011 — 2021Freelance design through German and international agencies, for brands like these: UX, branding, user research, packaging and print.
“There’s a short list of people… whom I’d call if I were to start my own venture and she’s definitely on it.”