I'm Chris Parsell

Hi, I’m Chris! I’m an Emmy-winning design and product leader working at the intersection of UX, artificial intelligence, and complex digital systems.

I’m currently Director of UI/UX & Workflow at Pfizer’s Commercial Applied AI Accelerator, where I lead experience strategy for a growing portfolio of enterprise AI products. My work focuses on a question I think will define the next generation of digital products: How do we design AI that people can understand, trust, and actually use?

‍That means thinking beyond screens and interfaces. I design workflows, interaction models, AI experience patterns, and design systems that help turn intelligence into decisions. I’m particularly interested in human-AI collaboration, agentic experiences, explainability, adaptive interfaces, and the emerging design language of AI-native software.

Before Pfizer, I led product UX at NBCUniversal, working on content discovery and digital television experiences, including the Paris 2024 Olympics, work that contributed to an Emmy Award for Outstanding Interactive Experience. Earlier in my career, I worked on the AWS Management Console at Amazon Web Services, helping rethink how millions of customers navigate, search, and work across an extraordinarily complex product ecosystem.

I’m also a UX instructor, lifelong technologist, designer, builder, and unapologetic tinkerer. I’ve been fascinated by the relationship between people and computers since the days when getting a machine to do something interesting often involved a blinking cursor and a suspicious amount of BASIC.

‍21cgeek is where those threads come together.

‍It’s my notebook for exploring AI, UX, product design, emerging interfaces, creative technology, games, experiments, and whatever strange new thing computers have learned to do this week.

The technology keeps changing.The interesting part is still figuring out what humans should do with it.I'm a Senior Product Manager and Designer at NBC Universal in New York City, designing streaming and digital tv apps and games. I'm passionate about UX and Product Management, so much so that even my hobbies tend to have some connection in this area.

I love taking abstract and seemingly impossible ideas and prototyping them through research and design sprints until they're real. I also love thinking about the challenges of creating inclusive and elegant interfaces for the next billion users out there that could last 20 years.

My core area of expertise is being able to build experiences around the vaguest of ideas of requirements. I consider this among my skills and talents to be my primary superpower, and it has brought me to some of the most interesting and creatively fulfilling projects of my career.