Product dev leader, outcome driven UX advocate, & systems designer.
Product dev leader, outcome driven UX advocate, & systems designer.
As a product professional with over a decade of UX and product experience, I have determined that the core source of quality software usability is about enabling not just our customers, but also our colleagues.
Director of UX Operations -- June 2024 - Current
Focusing on Design Ops, Design System, UX Research Operations, and UX Writing Content Management.
● Research Operations vetted, negotiated terms, onboarded, and operated change management for several new UX research tools.
● Self-service Content Management operationalized product content to allow for PMs and designers to produce their own copy and reduce dependence on in-house content writers via a suite of automated tooling.
● UX Research Automation used tools to automatically create metric reports for user behavior, behavior triggered video recordings of key user flows, and in product messaging to create a simple UX quality score tracked over time.
● Project Management Standards onboarded the design, research, and content teams to Jira and created robust automation to keep track of distributed work and embedded work for effective cross-dependency tracking
● Building Mobile First Design Systems Directing several designers, engineers, technical program managers, and product managers to effectively democratize design system utilization and creation across 3 divisions and all platforms.
● Roadmap planning created the company’s first globally unified roadmap for design and UX in collaboration with SVPs of all product areas. Managed cross-team dependencies.
Senior Manager - Product Design — January 2023 - June 2024
Design System
Launched Grafana’s first accessible, scalable, public, atomic design system. Partnering with the distinguished engineer co-founder and other cross functional partners to optimize the system for both engineers and designers.
Crafted adaptive contribution standards that accelerated production while improving interface consistency
Authored and ran UI oriented user testing to optimize cross product workflows and patterns
Developed theme structures in collaboration with engineering to enable a single source of truth between our .json code and our figma library using Token Studio
Oversaw implementation of AI/ML interface standards
Security & Identity Authentication
Oversaw the improvement of cloud migration tooling from a guided experience to self-serve, increasing cloud adoption for customers significantly at a much lower cost. Used Optimizely for split testing.
Trained and guided UX designers and Product Managers on discovery techniques and workshops in order to uncover problems and create consensus for a new unified authentication system needed to maintain relationships with key customers.
Developed a strategy to improve RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) in Grafana to improve our permissioning and roles oriented experience for users.
Data exploration & Observability Troubleshooting
Oversaw a principle and senior product designer to solve for the unique data filtration and access standards in Google’s SRE functions to enable their adoption of Grafana’s tools
Directed design resources to utilize existing components and patterns native to Grafana to quickly deliver value to the Google team, surpassing in quality the previous internal Google UI.
Connected disparate parts of the organizing with unifying patterns. Outlined strategy for improved troubleshooting workflows that cross between opinionated cloud tools and on prem big tent datasource solutions solving for our prominent enterprise hybrid accounts.
Observability collaboration tooling
Optimized report generation and sharing to improve response time for root cause analysis
Standardized cross product navigational systems including interior page navigation and cross product navigation. Balanced the needs of several high level stakeholders while keeping the focus on user value.
Ran discovery efforts for a unified history function to catalog user activity and auto-generate notebooks/runbooks
Recruiting & Team Building
Recruited and trained two additional headcount in one year
Oversaw the growth and promotion of two product designers
Operated a completely remote, distributed, international, 8 person UX team within a 24 person UX organization
Navigated a company wide and department level reorg
Senior Manager - Product Design — September 2021 - November 2022
Recruited and trained a team of UX Product Designers and Content Strategists to develop B2B and B2C ecommerce and subscription software in the fitness and wellness space.
Acted in a dual role of program manager and personnel manager.
As program manager I oversaw the team’s internal operations, design system, integrations, payments, personnel/payroll management and consumer business units.
As personnel manager I oversaw the growth and development of all levels of UX designers, full time and contract, as well as content team members.
Primary accomplishments & focus areas:
Instituted the company wide design system overseeing 12 engineers (6 desktop, 6 mobile), 4 designers, and 2 content writers. Established workflow systems, visual standards, and engineering practices
Managed billing and checkout standardization, consolidating 9 different checkout processes into one standardized mobile first system using multivariate testing methods
Oversaw the full rebuild of the consumer mobile app, including onboarding, customer facing checkout, search & account management
Instituted several integrations with various 3rd parties in the fin-tech space
UX Manager & Senior Product Designer — July 2016 - September 2021
Developed product and led team members in the B2B ecommerce and marketing space. Daily work included:
Managing a remote office of designers and engineers in a lean startup workflow for a website builder and ecommerce platform software team
Facilitated UX and market research for the mobile team
Developed business use cases and problem statements, often acting as product manager, using data driven input via HotJar and Google Analytics
Led daily design cadences, managed Kanban boards, and facilitated weekly design reviews.
Managed design operations, standardization of design workflows, practices, and tools
In charge of our innovation lab and our twice yearly hackathons.
UX designer — April 2015 - July 2016
Developed user driven, metrics focused, ecommerce solutions for both owners (B2B) and renters (B2C).
Managed a full mobile first overhaul of the business management platform entailing calendar, finance, and messaging management.
Optimized the mobile customer ecommerce checkout funnel using a wide array of A/B testing, live code prototyping, and usability studies.
Marketing Design Manager — August 2012 - April 2015
Leaf, Mobile Point of Sale software and hardware company. Initial responsibilities included:
Managed the marketing team, including the social media marketing team, the front of site team, and the email marketing team.
Acted as lead branding designer and instituted a rebrand of the company.
Worked cross-team between marketing and product to ensure product brand guidelines were met including UX patterns, developing a design system
Worked as an individual contributor on the Point of Sale and web product team.
The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University
Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Graphic Design September 2008-2012