I lead best with my hands on the work. At eLumen, a startup of engineers with no UX practice, I built the practice from zero, hired 3 designers and embedded each one in a dev team. At Siemens I ran design system governance across a 330+ product portfolio while still designing the patterns myself.
Below: the roles I have held, the teams I have managed, and how I bring executives and developers along.
Team: Mentored 10 designers. Led a cross-functional design system team and 8 working groups of SMEs.
Led design system alignment and the unified pattern library. Product owner on 5 flagship products. Built 3 AI tools for design teams.
Team: Managed 3 designers I hired, each embedded in a dev team.
Founded the UX practice and built a 1,000+ component design system.
Team: Led 4 multidisciplinary creative teams.
Ran the new product pipeline: 12 multimedia curriculum systems from concept to release, and 8 contextual research projects.
Team: Directed 45+ creatives and technical staff, including a team of 20 animators.
Drove the concept for Whirl, which beat first-year projections by about 30%.
Launched the company’s first web-delivered multimedia curriculum platform and The Lutheran Handbook, which sold 300,000+ copies in its first year.
The same 4 stages, whether the project is a pattern or a new product line.
Contextual research, site visits and interviews to find the real problem.
Ideation with designers, SMEs and engineers, made visible in maps and wireframes.
Testing with users across contexts before anything becomes a standard.
Handoff into Agile teams, then governance so the work holds.
The artifacts I used to align people. Open a story for the details.
eLumen, UX Manager / Senior UX Analyst
I needed a crisp, visual way to show stakeholders my plan for the year I spent doing the foundational design system work, solo.
This map helped me persuade the CEO to fund a large contextual research project that became the foundation of the work. The next year I got the green light to hire my own team of 3.
Siemens Digital Industries Software, UX Manager
I needed a clear, repeatable process to take the working groups through while staying aligned with stakeholders.
This map made it easy to communicate the working groups’ process in all directions. I led 8 groups of SMEs through it over 18 months. Each run got easier.
Siemens Digital Industries Software, UX Manager
As the organization added higher-order UX work such as patterns to the pipeline, confusion grew about the difference between components and patterns.
I socialized this deck through the UI and UX teams. It caused a bit of dismay, but it gave us a framework for separating them and sending new work to the right team.
Siemens Digital Industries Software, UX Manager
Our newly formed UX organization needed north stars. In a cross-functional group, I took responsibility for the architecture and look of a website to house the org’s design principles: the standard we would all march behind.
I designed a site that turns high-falutin’ notions of design purity into practical rules, even for developers.
Siemens Digital Industries Software, UX Manager
We needed to know how our internal customers wanted to consume these design principles.
I ran 25 structured interviews with internal customers and sent a survey to everyone beyond them. That gave us a very effective content and communications plan.
Team process design
Developers are often uneasy engaging with design functions, to say nothing of end users. I needed a way for coders to engage directly with stakeholders, define their work and communicate well, while keeping their sense of safety.
Deceptively simple and brief, these forms let our devs gather the information they needed without offending anyone.
Siemens Digital Industries Software, UX Manager
We needed a new, centralized website where internal customers could browse and consume a massive design system. I scraped together rough wireframes to jumpstart the process.
I wireframed the basic architecture and led the team from those ragged wireframes to a final product that still serves the organization. Whew!
Siemens Digital Industries Software, UX Manager
The UX organization was facing some basic apprehension at the advent of AI.
I wrote a brief deck and socialized it through the teams. It was later added to the company’s formal guidance on AI and UX.