Bjorn Byrne — UX & Product Innovation, Johannesburg

Bjorn Byrne is a UX and product innovation lead based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has 15+ years of experience in the trade and is the founder of two agencies: Dynamite and Media Rocket. His work focuses on product strategy, UX design, design systems, and bringing meaningful products to market.

Contact

Email: [email protected]. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bjorn-byrne-13775720.

Companies

• Dynamite
• Media Rocket

Skills

• UX Design
• Product Design
• Product Strategy
• Design Systems
• Product Innovation

Services

Fractional product & UX leadership — fractional product design leadership, AI workflow strategy, design system audits, and advisory. Johannesburg & remote.

Writing

• The R500 000 website nobody can find — A beautiful corporate site, a serious budget, and zero organic leads. It happens all over South Africa, and the reasons are boringly fixable. Run the ten-minute findability audit before you blame the algorithm.
• Hire the question-asker, not the prompt engineer — Everyone suddenly needs an "AI person" and nobody agrees on what that is. The scarce skill isn't operating the models. It's knowing which problems deserve them.
• The UX audit that fits on one page — Most UX audits are 60 slides of findings nobody actions. A useful audit fits on one page, because it only reports what someone will actually fix this quarter.
• Stop calling everything a design system — A Figma file with 40 components is not a design system. Here's the test I run before I'll use the term - and what to build if you fail it.
• Load shedding taught SA business the one thing Silicon Valley can't teach — For a decade, South African companies ran involuntary disaster-recovery drills twice a day. The lights are back on - but the next outage has already moved to the taps.
• Your AI pilot worked. That's the problem. — Every company has an AI demo that wowed the exec meeting. Almost none have it in production a year later. The gap has a name - and three questions that close it.
• AI is a tool, not a strategy — Every week a founder tells me they're "adding AI to the product." Cool — what problem? Silence. Here's the diagnostic I run before any AI build.

Free tools

• WebWorkshop — free in-browser workshop for scoping and briefing a website project.
• BrandWorkshop — free in-browser workshop for shaping a brand brief.