Most proud of:

Approaching ambiguity with structures and collaboration.

Design maturity can vary across cross-functional businesses (product, engineering, and science) at AWS, resulting in inefficient design reviews strained by tech-constrained solutioning, ambiguous product requirements, and feedback churn. I created a mechanism called “Trio Processes” to establish structure in the collaboration model with UX, provide visibility to stakeholders, drive decision alignment, and track open questions. Over the years, I iterated on the format, created templates and guidelines, and successfully scaled the mechanism to 10+ product teams (500-person org).

Raising the bar on design as a force-multiplier.

Designers embedded in product teams were either overloaded and burnt out or underutilized and working on unfunded projects. This was largely due to fast-moving roadmaps with inconsistent intake, unclear engagement models, unmanaged capacity, and the common pitfall of treating design as ticket-takers and pixel-pushers. I created systems to raise the bar for UX Design as a strategic partner on high impact projects, empowering employees to own their schedule (“workback plans”), leverage a prioritization framework, iterate on engagement models (“UX office hours”), and work backwards from the right solution (“UX one-pagers”). As a result, I founded the “UX pod” structure to maintain relatively low headcount while increasing scope of impact (designers could swarm during surges or pinch-hit to increase coverage), engineering teams were unblocked, and employee satisfaction remained high (based on internal manager ratings).

Strengths

As a practitioner, my top 3 strengths are:

• Rapid concept generation

• UI design (visual, interaction, motion, design systems)

• Design Operations (DesignOps)

Process in a nutshell

Discover, Dive Deep, & Deliver

• Conducting continuous discovery & validation with end users.

• Partnering closely with engineers & product managers.

• Providing high quality deliverables & visioning.

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