Matt Reynolds

TikTok / ByteDance2024 — 2026

Symphony Creative Studio

Zero-to-one multimodal AI creation for advertisers and creators.

Role
Staff Product Designer, GenAI

Problem

Making platform-native video advertising is expensive, slow, and unfamiliar. An advertiser arrives with a product page and a budget, not a script, a face, a voice, or an edit.

The underlying models could already generate scripts, avatars, voice, images, and video. None of that was a product. Capability was scattered across demos with no shared notion of intent, review, control, or recovery.

My scope

  • 01Product model and interaction design for the end-to-end generation → review → edit → export loop.
  • 02Custom Avatars, Creative Cue scripting, voice, image and video generation surfaces.
  • 03The system-level behavior nobody owns by default: progress, partial failure, regeneration cost, and human override.
  • 04Player-coach: I set the pattern language and personally designed the highest-risk interactions.

The decision

I led the shift from a menu of model demos to one guided creation loop.

Every generative step had to answer the same four questions in the same place: what am I about to spend, what did I get, what can I change, and how do I get back. That turned a set of impressive demos into a workflow an advertiser could trust with a live campaign.

I made review checkpoints and human override part of the interaction model instead of hiding them behind a one-click promise. Advertisers needed to remain visibly in charge of what their brand said; the control surface was the product, not the model.

What shipped

  • 01Public launch of Symphony Creative Studio.
  • 02Custom Avatar creation and reuse, Creative Cue ideation, script-to-video assembly, inline editing, and export to ad delivery.
  • 03A reusable pattern set for generative state — pending, partial, failed, regenerated, human-edited — adopted by adjacent GenAI surfaces.

Recognition

Result

#1
most-used feature in the suite (Custom Avatars)
60%
reduction in cost per install for campaigns using generated creative
92%
drop in production cost per avatar spot
$3.3M
attributed revenue in the first year

Figures reflect internal reporting for the advertiser-facing surfaces I led.