# Trevor McNaughton > trvr.co — Personal site and portfolio of Trevor McNaughton, a product design leader based in Oakland, CA. This file provides detailed context for LLMs per the llms.txt spec (https://llmstxt.org/). ## About Trevor McNaughton is a Principal Product Designer at MoonPay, where he leads design initiatives across MoonPay's product ecosystem. He's based in Oakland, California. He has 14+ years of product design experience spanning payments, conversational AI, developer tools, and consumer mobile. He's a two-time founder with two acquisitions — init.ai was acquired by Apple, and Meso was acquired by MoonPay. He designs and builds: prototyping in production code, shipping internal tools, and connecting design systems directly to frontend codebases. Trevor thinks in systems and ships in code. He's not a thought leader who occasionally ships — he's a builder who leads. ## Career ### MoonPay (2022–present) **Principal Product Designer** Joined through the acquisition of Meso. Leads design initiatives across MoonPay's product ecosystem, including ramps, mobile app, developer platform/DX, and design systems. Shipped the MoonPay mobile app, headless ramps, Connect and Auth UI. Built AI-powered design workflows using Claude, MCP server integrations, and custom Figma plugins that connect the design system directly to the frontend codebase. ### Meso (2021–2022) **Founding Designer** First employee at a crypto payments startup focused on making fiat-to-crypto seamless for developers and their users. Built everything from brand and product to developer experience, working directly with CEO Ben Myles and a small founding team. Took the product from first commit to acquisition by MoonPay. Key outcomes included over $35M in volume, 145K transfers, 25K users, and a 32% conversion rate from signup through KYC to first transfer. Built and launched Meso Cash, an internal dogfooding app that became one of the company's biggest integration partners. Led user experience research with UXR contractors to validate early prototypes in a privacy-focused industry where recruiting users was a real challenge. ### Apple / Siri (2017–2021) **Designer → Design Manager** Joined through the acquisition of init.ai. Contributed to conversational design experiences, authoring tools, and multimodal, multi-device design systems for Siri at a scale of 1B+ devices. Specific work is under NDA. ### init.ai (2015–2017) **Co-Founder & Head of Design** Co-founded a natural language understanding platform that helped computers understand human conversation. Designed conversational intelligence authoring tools and training interfaces. The company was acquired by Apple in 2017. ### Braintree / PayPal (2013–2016) **Senior Product Designer** Redesigned merchant experiences including self-service onboarding and developer integration flows for Braintree's payment infrastructure. ### Earlier Career Product design roles at Picturelife (photo storage and organization) and other startups. ## How He Works **Prototype to production.** Prototypes at nearly every stage. Sometimes the prototype ships as production code, sometimes it doesn't. Either way, it helps the team feel and refine the experience early. **Systems over silos.** Approaches design as part of a larger system. Every decision should scale across teams, platforms, and over time. That means early alignment with engineering and product. **Real problems, measured impact.** Measures success in user acquisition, retention, and revenue — not likes. Focuses on problems that move the business forward while delivering the best user experience. **Ship real things, often.** Believes in shipping something 80% complete and learning from it. Real users teach you more than any design review. ## Technical Depth - Designs and builds production UI — React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS - AI-native design practice: Claude-powered workflows, MCP server integrations for connecting design tools to code - Custom Figma plugin development connecting design systems to frontend codebases - Comfortable across the stack: has built internal tools, developer SDKs, and production prototypes - Thinks in systems architecture — how design decisions compose and scale ## Domains - **Payments / Fintech:** Braintree, Meso, MoonPay — fiat, crypto, merchant tools, developer SDKs - **Conversational AI / NLP:** init.ai, Apple/Siri — authoring tools, multi-device systems, natural language understanding - **Developer Tools:** Developer experience, API design, SDK integration flows, documentation - **Consumer Mobile:** Mobile app design, multi-platform design systems ## Personal - Passionate photographer — shoots with a Sony a7IV and Leica Q3 - Plant-based - Cyclist - Based in Oakland, CA ## MCP Server Trevor's portfolio is also available as a remote MCP server for AI agents and tools. Any MCP-compatible client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.) can connect and query structured information about his career, work, and interests. - Endpoint: https://mcp.trvr.co/mcp - Discovery: https://trvr.co/.well-known/mcp.json - Transport: Streamable HTTP - Auth: None (all information is intentionally public) Available tools: `get_about`, `get_career_history`, `get_current_focus`, `get_approach`, `get_interests`, `get_contact`, `ask_about_trevor` ## Links - Site: https://trvr.co - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/trevormcnaughton - GitHub: https://github.com/trevormcnaughton - Email: trevor.mcnaughton@gmail.com ## Site Details trvr.co is built with React, TypeScript, Vite, and Tailwind CSS 4. Deployed to Cloudflare. The site includes a home page with career overview and a Meso case study with project details, assets, and key metrics.