DESIGN LEADERSHIP

Over the years, I’ve had opportunities to grow teams and individuals, elevate design into a strategic product partner, and drive effectiveness by establishing research and driving impactful design rituals. I’ve transformed design teams to implement design at scale in efficient ways, setting the design org roadmap, establishing design systems, and contributing to company-wide OKRs.

Growing individuals

At Pathstream, I work with individuals to draft personal quarterly OKRs, and practice Co-Active coaching skills to help team members develop career plans and goals. We’ve also established design rituals such as design reviews attended by executive leadership, casual design share-outs to provide live feedback, and regular team building events to stay close as a fully remote team across different time zones.

Growing teams

At Lumanu, I doubled the team within my first three months to staff properly across visual, growth, design systems, and product design. I also collaborated with them to define design career paths. Getting buy-in from our executive stakeholders, I was able to use this clear pathing to promote a team member into a senior level within six months.

At Pathstream, I hired a researcher to develop our archetypes and work towards evangelizing research across the company.

Depending on design maturity at an org, I will establish or refine hiring processes to make sure candidates meet cross-functional team members, are clear on portfolio presentation requirements, and the hiring panel is clear on what they’ll be evaluating on.

Teambuilding

I introduced a quarterly design retro cadence which helped to define our team norms and expectations around how to work together, develop design principles, and work towards clear improvements within and across teams. Sometimes these retros include our product partners as well, particularly for process improvement discussions.

Increasing visibility

I also partnered with executive peers across the startup to drive visibility for my design org’s work and contributions, evidenced by highly attended design reviews to socialize work across the company.