Strategic, outcome-driven design leader with extensive experience building and directly managing large cross-disciplinary design teams across a range of industry verticals. My passion for people and penchant for process are foundational to how I lead teams, collaborate with partners, and influence product strategy.
Cross Industry Experience
In-house and consultancy experience across a variety of industry sectors — Social Media, Digital Advertising, Healthcare, Retail, Travel, Real Estate, Consumer & Enterprise Electronics, and Warehouse & Delivery — affords me a multi-facted perspective when approaching new problem spaces.
Leadership Values
People
I care deeply about people — both my design team and the users we serve.
This shows up in how I hire, mentor, and develop designers and leaders across the team, and how I lead with empathy.
Partners
Aligning with our peers across Product, Engineering, Marketing, UX functions, and other key teams is critical to ensure effective leadership, healthy teams, shared vision, and a successful product.
Product
My role as a design leader is to drive UX strategy, translate business needs into clear direction for the team, and ensure the quality of the user experience.
These help the design team contribute to the overall success of the product and increase brand perception and user sentiment.
Process
Early in my leadership journey, I led a Design Operations team, where it became clear how vital process is to ensure faster cross-functional alignment and shared language, goals, expectations, and success metrics. That said, process doesn’t need to be heavy-handed to be effective.
Core Competencies
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Design Leadership
• Design Hiring
• Org Design
• Talent Development / Mentorship
• Career Planning
• Resourcing + Load Balancing
• Budget Planning
• Design Operations
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Thought Leadership
• 0-to-1 Product Strategy
• Design Workshop Facilitation
• User Experience Vision Setting
• Concept Development
• Evangelism + Executive Pitches
• Industry Conferences
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Tools & Frameworks
• Observational Research
• User Journey Mapping
• Jobs-to-be-Done
• Quality: Usefulness+Usability+Craft
• Prioritization Framworks
• Figma, Adobe Suite
• AI Tools
Favorite Career Moments
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Role: Head of Design for New Facebook Experiences incubator.During COVID, many faith institutions across a broad range of practices adopted Facebook video as a platform for live services and community connection.
As an incubator, we explored the end-to-end faith experience as a solo practitioner and for communities, then conceptualized and launched a series of features to support their experience.
What a great opportunity to unlock more facets of the human experience and help Meta determine its right and willingness to step into this new space.
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Role: Strategic Design Manager responsible for Productivity ProductsWe had a long history of delivering large, rugged mobile devices for industrial contexts. But, it became clear that we were at an inflection point and needed to revitalize our offerings for Retail.
I worked closely with Product leaders to conduct customer site visits, driver user research, and define/spec a more pocketable but just as rugged device for retail that could be used flexibly between the front and back of store — and launch to the market in one third of the time.
And if that wasn’t exciting enough, the team received a Red Dot Design award for our efforts.
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Role: Experience Design ManagerHistorically, Honeywell has been a large company with a broad product portfolio, often as a result of many acquisitions. As a result, our products, at the time, did not have a cohesive aesthetic or interconnectivity at the functional level.
As a lead in the Honeywell User Experience team, I had the opportunity to connect physical and digital designers across multiple divisions along with external agency resources and envision a new design system which has since been executed across hundreds of products.
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Role: Project LeadAs a travel influencer with a focus on women from diverse backgrounds, I put a team of similarly-focused influencers together and we were one of three teams selected by the National Parks Foundation for a campaign highlighting diversity in the parks.
Our visit to Washington state’s Olympic National Park and the overall engagement was featured in the NY Times.
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Role: Commencement Speaker
Through my work at Motorola, I had the pleasure of connecting with Saki Mafundikwa, the founder of the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts in Harare. Saki was doing phenomenal work there and abroad, to elevate the profile of African design talent. It was such an honor to celebrate the ZIVA’s 10th anniversary graduation ceremony with them.
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Role: Core Sponsor Representing DesignIn partnership with a Motorola Product leader, an Engineering leader, we envisioned and founded the UIC Innovation Center. This included not just the seed funding, defining and designing the physical spaces for lectures, collaboration, UX Research and Prototyping, as well as coaching the first set of year-long multidisciplinary courses, and hosting invited guest speakers. Still thriving, the center has expanded to include new corporate sponsors and new cross-disciplinary campus engagements.
Testimonials