Founder product100K+ users
Cute Tarot reached a real consumer audience.
Diana created the iPhone and Android product as part of a wider brand and customer ecosystem. The apps reached more than 100,000 users. See the Cute Tarot product story.
About / Los Angeles / Independent senior-led product engineering
Diana Lopez is the product engineerbehind PixelsWithin.
Based in Los Angeles, Diana brings 15+ years across product direction, UX, architecture, and hands-on engineering. The person learning your business stays with the build.
- 15+ years
- designing and shipping products
- 100K+
- users across Cute Tarot apps
- $500K+
- Cute Tarot retail sales
- 5.0 / 8
- Clutch rating and verified reviews
- Los Angeles
- working with teams across North America
The direct answer / 01
Diana works directly with business owners and product teams to turn complicated operations or still-forming ideas into websites, apps, integrations, and custom software.
Her role crosses the boundaries that often fragment a product: understanding the business, choosing what deserves to be built, designing the experience, deciding how the system should work, and writing the software.
PixelsWithin is independent by design. Clients keep one senior counterpart from first questions through launch and continued improvement. See how that continuity shapes the process.
The through-line
Why stay close to the whole problem?
The web became a way to make ideas tangible.
Diana has been fascinated by websites and apps since middle school. The early appeal was immediate: an idea could become something another person could see, use, and respond to.
That curiosity became professional work in 2009, beginning with ecommerce systems and custom business software. Design and engineering never felt like separate destinations. Each answered a different part of the same question: how should this work for the person using it?
Entire problems resisted clean departmental lines.
Across healthcare, payroll, tax, media, ecommerce, manufacturing, logistics, and nonprofits, the most consequential choices rarely belonged to one discipline. A better interface could require a new data boundary. A sound architecture could still support the wrong business behavior.
Diana kept moving toward the whole problem: requirements, research, information architecture, product design, frontend systems, mobile products, integrations, delivery process, and the commercial decisions underneath them.
PixelsWithin preserves continuity.
The practice exists so the evidence discovered in a conversation can remain present when a screen becomes a system. Product decisions and implementation stay close enough to correct one another.
That does not mean every project needs only one skill. It means the client has one accountable senior lead who understands why the product is taking its shape and can bring in other expertise without giving away the thread.
Five eras, one practice
How did Diana become a cross-disciplinary product engineer?
- 01
Business software and ecommerce
Professional work began in ecommerce systems and custom software, where interfaces, data, operations, and revenue were visibly connected.
- 02
UX, platforms, and design leadership
Diana moved deeper into UX and product design, helped build a proprietary website platform, and trained designers to ship consistent client experiences.
- 03
Complex products and modernization
Work across Gusto, Vertex, DEFY Media, and other teams included product experiments, high-traffic systems, and a large Flash-to-React tax platform migration.
- 04
Products with customers and consequences
Cute Tarot connected mobile apps, publishing, ecommerce, and retail—reaching 100K+ app users and generating $500K+ in retail sales.
- 05
PixelsWithin
Diana brings product judgment, design, architecture, engineering, and founder-level commercial thinking into one direct relationship with clients.
Attributable experience
What evidence does Diana bring to the work now?
The useful measure of experience is not only time. It is what the work required Diana to notice, decide, build, and remain responsible for.
These outcomes come from founder products, client work, enterprise teams, and verified reviews.
Commercial proof$500K+ sales
Product decisions connected to a business.
Cute Tarot generated more than $500,000 in retail sales and earned distribution through Barnes & Noble. The work joined software, brand, physical product, ecommerce, and customer experience. Review the attributable outcomes.
Public infrastructureUnicode
Traffic and sponsorship moved after the redesign.
Unicode reported a jump in traffic and several new sponsorships after Diana restructured, designed, and developed its public website. See the Unicode work.
Operational UX1nHealth
High-frequency healthcare workflows became faster.
Diana reduced a common messaging task from four clicks to one and accelerated an important lookup from roughly five seconds to half a second. See the 1nHealth improvements.
Enterprise modernizationFlash → React
A ten-person team gained a modern foundation.
Diana contributed interface systems, CSS architecture, development tooling, version control, and team process to a large tax platform migration. Read the modernization case study.
Verified clients8 reviews
5.0 on Clutch across eight verified reviews.
Reviews describe responsiveness, understanding, strong execution, and ideas improved through product judgment. Read the verified reviews.
Experience applied now
What does Diana contribute inside an engagement?
Cross-disciplinary work is useful when each discipline can correct the others. Product choices create technical consequences; technical boundaries reshape the product; commercial reality changes what should happen first.
Diana stays hands-on across all five lenses.
01Direction
Product judgment
Find the real condition beneath a requested feature, choose the riskiest assumption, define a coherent first release, and keep priorities connected to evidence.
02Experience
UX and interface design
Turn workflows, information, permissions, and exceptions into an experience people can understand without erasing the complexity they genuinely need.
03Boundaries
Architecture
Decide how data, services, integrations, privacy, migrations, and operational continuity should work before hidden constraints become expensive.
04Delivery
Engineering
Build working software directly, test assumptions through use, and keep implementation close enough to the original context to change intelligently.
05Viability
Founder-level commercial thinking
Consider runway, adoption, customer trust, maintenance, distribution, ownership, and the difference between an impressive feature and a viable product.
Human agency and AI
Tools create leverage. People choose the consequence.
AI can expand research, prototypes, code, and possible answers with extraordinary speed. Diana uses that leverage aggressively where it improves the work.
The hand in the PixelsWithin mythology represents agency: the ability to touch the work and change its shape. The brain is judgment. The wheel is leverage. Fire holds transformation and risk together. Stars orient a decision rather than making it.
A human remains accountable for what becomes part of the product: the source of truth, privacy boundary, architecture, acceptable error, review point, and effect on the people who use it.
What do clients say about working with Diana?
Notes in the margin are often where the actual product appears.
“She took our ideas and made them better.”
“She seemed to effortlessly understand what it was that we were looking for. She took our ideas and made them better.”
John G. McCabe
Senior Consultant, Decision Analysis Inc.
“She would ask the right questions.”
“Diana would ask the right questions, which helped us reevaluate some of our ideas. We got the impression that she loves what she does—it’s not just code for her.”
Krishna Somandepalli
PhD Researcher, USC
“A jump in traffic and several new sponsorships.”
“We needed to update a 90s-era website to better engage with the general public, especially those using phones. We saw a jump in traffic and several new sponsorships.”
Greg W.
VP of Marketing, Unicode Consortium
“Fantastic ideas added along the way.”
“Once she had a clear understanding of our needs and the specific market we were targeting, she built the website, with fantastic ideas added along the way.”
Phil T.
CEO, Netovation Limited
“I can focus solely on what I do best.”
“Diana’s work has made a massive difference to my businesses. She has a keen eye and keeps up with all the latest trends. With Diana, I can focus solely on what I do best.”
Aaron I.
CEO, Contract.org
Work directly with Diana
Bring the unfinished idea or the workflow that refuses to become simple.
You do not need a finished brief. Start with the business situation, the people living with it, and what cannot keep working this way.
