I love a good problem. Here are some snapshots of a few that I’ve solved.
Compass Core Experiences
SELECTED WORK
Implementing a new team working model and enabling the team to deliver crucial platform solutions for user collaboration
My Role: Senior Platform Design Manager
Initiative Timeline: May–August 2022
The Identity Platform team at Compass encompassed two squads—Authentication (sign-in and sign-up) and Authorization (user access and permissions). We created a new Identity org structure to introduce a third squad—Collaboration Experiences—which would focus on front-end experiences. After three calendar quarters of dipping team morale and stalling on shipping new product features, our goal as leaders was to improve team alignment, motivation, and velocity. Together with my Product and Engineering partners, we designed a new working model for the team, addressing organization within and between squads, responsibilities and ownership, and a new comprehensive set of weekly and monthly team rituals. Upon presenting our proposal to senior and executive leadership, we rapidly implemented our new team model, which reduced noise and churn for the team through better resource allocation, disciplined prioritization, strong stakeholder management, higher transparency, and processes for intake and feedback.
A top company goal was to expand the collaboration platform to enable Compass agents to share and collaborate with external users, in addition to their own team members. After previously stalled progress and slipping timelines for over 6 months, Product and Design was able to deliver in one quarter on this crucial initiative. With more effective rituals and processes in place, our Design team had better focus on prioritized requirements for an immensely complex (and legally compliant) back-end. The team ultimately created a sharing/collaboration solution that was scalable and flexible enough to integrate into various experiences and use cases, with consistent UX patterns across both mobile and web. This solution would provide Compass agents with an intuitive, consistent way to collaborate with anyone on any resource from the 20+ apps across the Compass platform. With our team’s outreach, socialization efforts, and office hours, we were able to secure commitments from applications across the Complass platform to adopt our collaboration platform solution.
CNBC Mobile & OTT Apps
SELECTED WORK
Transforming the way teams work together, using product discovery to identify and solve problems
My Role: Design Manager
Initiative Timeline: May 2019–May 2020
I was brought on to the CNBC Apps & Emerging Platforms team to help evolve their way of working, improve design processes, and lead the team through Product Discovery. It had historically been a siloed design-as-a-service environment, which was impeding innovative product solutions and affecting team velocity. Repairing strained relationships—particularly between Product and Design—was a critical first step. The next steps were defining process and coaching team members on conducting product discovery to define problems and rapidly test solution ideas.
While continuing to foster trust and collaboration, I facilitated and led the team to successfully complete numerous discovery efforts and design sprints, resulting in actionable product opportunities: reimagining the CNBC OTT viewing experience to more deeply engage viewers, delivering a personalized Markets experience on the iOS app for better engagement and conversion, and communicating value propositions of CNBC PRO to subscribers to reduce the monthly churn rate. The process of bringing the team together also resulted in a marked improvement in overall team health, motivation, and cross-functional collaboration, which was also recognized by senior leadership.
Prentke Romich Company AAC Devices
SELECTED WORK
Modernizing the control panel experience of Prentke Romich Company's communication devices for caregivers of non-verbal communicators
My Role: Engagement Manager / Design Strategist
Project Timeline: Feb 2016–Jan 2017
Prentke Romich Company (PRC) is a leading producer of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices, which enable communication for non-verbal children and adults, many of whom have cerebral palsy, autism, or ALS. PRC’s language system had been lauded for the past 50 years, but their settings software (the Toolbox) and their powerful Vocabulary Builder teaching tool were almost as old, both of which are essential for customizing and configuring PRC devices. Caregivers (speech-language pathologists, parents, teachers) of non-verbal communicators continuously struggled with optimizing their PRC devices. The outdated interface was inefficient and intimidating, with a steep learning curve that resulted in increased costs for the company in training and technical support.
Using PRC’s data logs and our own qualitative research to guide our design strategy, I led our team to overhaul the experience to instill confidence for first-time users, increase comprehension of the Toolbox interface, empower users to become experts, and remove obstacles so speech-language pathologists can focus on teaching language. Prototype testing yielded overwhelmingly positive feedback from both users and PRC training staff.
The new Toolbox comes pre-installed on newer generation PRC devices. According to our client, it has been a substantial driver in new users adopting the software and has greatly helped the company gain a competitive advantage over iPads. The redesign helped achieve their goals of saving their training consultants and end users time—the time for an initial user setup had been reduced by nearly 50%.