Chris
Killoran.

Software product design director. Sixteen years, four continents, one application — for Nothing.

Three reasons I'm in this conversation.

Sixteen years building software product design at the awkward stages — first UX team at Temenos, ground-up design system at Metrea inside defence-tech, design leadership at Virgin Media, BlackRock, Refinitiv and Orbus.

One. Hands-on now with on-device LLMs and multi-agent systems — Ollama, Hermes Agent, OpenClaw. Prototyping the AI-native loops Nothing has publicly committed to for 2026 — what Carl Pei has described as “intelligence that turns understanding into action.”

Two. Professional sound design and engineering training (VFS, 2009–10). Music production. Useful for Ear — and for Glyph, which is half audio anyway.

Three. I speak some Mandarin. Might be handy for the Shenzhen side of the business.

Not a talent problem. A coordination problem.

Nothing has a room full of people with ideas. The director's job isn't to add more — it's to channel the ones already in flight.

Five years from a sketch to global challenger across forty markets, with a hardware-software stack built from scratch. That creates the inevitable side effect of more creative energy than aligned direction. That's not a criticism. It's the cost of doing what Nothing has done at the speed Nothing has done it.

The work, then, is wrangling. Channelling that energy toward four outcomes that don't always agree: grow the company, hold competitive position, hit business targets, keep the community's trust. Each pulls in a different direction. Design is one of the few functions that touches all four.

The unifying thread is human–computer interaction across the ecosystem. Phone, watch, buds, headphones — held together by a visual language distinctive enough to matter. Get the HCI between hardware right, and the brand carries itself. Get it wrong, and even great products feel disconnected.

That's the job I want, and that's the lens I'd bring to it.

The OS is the product.

Carl has said publicly the goal is a billion OSes for a billion people, generated on demand. That's a directional statement, not a design system. The job is converting it into something shippable.

Three layers. A stable identity layer — typography, dot-matrix language, monochrome, sound design — that never adapts, because the brand needs a constant. An intent layer where surfaces are generated per user per task, replacing static apps with conversational and ambient affordances. And a trust layer that exposes what the system is doing on the user's behalf — because the failure mode of agentic OSes is opacity.

I'd push back hard on any version where personalisation erodes the brand. The visual restraint is the product.

London  ⇄  Shenzhen.

Sixteen years across distributed design teams — USA, Singapore, Sweden, Romania, Ukraine, India. Distribution isn’t a problem to manage; it’s an advantage if you set it up right. Global culture. Specialised expertise in every timezone. Hardware-software integration at the manufacturing source.

For a setup like Nothing’s — London, Shenzhen, Bangalore — the structure I’d build:

One. A central source of truth for design — components, motion tokens, copy tone — owned by one person and governed by dedicated team members, mirrored across offices.

Two. Global standards with regional flexibility — governance respects local requirements where they genuinely differ.

Avoiding parallel design tracks saves time and resources, sustains productivity, and maintains quality and excellence.

Days 1 to 90.

Sixteen years.

Built design systems and teams from zero, in environments that didn't tolerate ambiguity. Mission-critical software, regulated finance, consumer telco, infrastructure.

I use what I'd be designing.

Owning the products is the cheapest form of user research. The current rotation, including the value tier — because CMF is part of how this company actually reaches the next billion users.

Audio came first.

Sound design was my first formal discipline — Vancouver Film School, 2009–2010, Sound Design for Visual Media — before I moved into product design. It still runs underneath everything I do.

IMG

HOME STUDIO

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/ STUDIO — PRODUCTION + ENGINEERING

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DJ RIG

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/ DJ — PERFORMANCE

Practical relevance to Nothing: Ear, Ear Pro, CMF Headphones Pro, CMF Buds, plus the Glyph as an audio-visual language. Sound isn't a peripheral concern at this company — it's a primary surface. I treat it that way.

Engineering background, performance background, daily listening background — when the audio team and the product team are arguing about a haptic, I can sit in both rooms.

On whose shoulders.

Every designer's taste comes from somewhere. The three that matter most for how I'd approach this role — one school, two individuals, one continuous tradition.

Let's talk.

Shortest path is email. Same-day reply.