First user research at OpenAI spearheading the development of the user research practice. Leading a diverse range of projects shaping the definition of future products and gaining insights into current product usage, to drive growth and enhance the user experiences.

Establishing the UXR practice at OpenAI and partnering with product teams leveraging strategic insights to inform growth strategies for key initiatives.

Strategized, identified and incubated new ventures to drive long-term growth. Shifted portfolio strategy to thesis-driven investment approach and secured executive alignment on innovation with focus on GenAI. Championed idea exploration shift to user-centered design and experimentation to develop concrete reasons for idea investment.Impact: - Spearheaded development of three ideas that contributed 30% to annual investment goal.- Led incubation of a new idea and drove scrappy experimentation driven approach, resulting in a new concept yielding one of the highest conversion rates seen by executive team for early-stage ideas.- Mentored visiting “idea pioneers” and provided guidance on venture development process.

Developed best practices to ensure AI is responsible by design across entire company. Created E2E vision and strategy for integration of tools and best practices into AI development lifecycle for 30K+ software engineers, and built risk management system to assess and mitigate risk of AI causing harm while ensuring compliance with proposed EU AI act. Translated academic approach to measuring algorithmic bias into scalable process and tooling applied to all AI models.

For New Product Experimentation, managed internal incubator exploring future product ideas and opportunities. Counseled head of NPE on investment decisions for 30+ products allocating 150 people and $10M in operating expenses across the portfolio. Collaborated cross-functionally with leaders, user research, market strategy, and data science to develop investment thesis that shaped portfolio of product investments.- Developed data benchmarks and portfolio measurement process that tracked progress of 20+ product teams.- Defined stage-gate process to manage teams and defined international strategy for Nigeria, Korea, and India. - Shifted incentive and performance management system to drive risk taking and longer-term thinking.- Crafted thesis sprint program and partnered with 2 product leaders to develop data-backed product thesis.- Spearheaded 6-month program providing opportunities to join NPE and learn 0-1 product development practices.

Doubled the team size, hiring two user researchers increasing the teams capacity to support the New Product Experimentation organizationStreamlined internal policy & legal processes to halve the time and overhead required to conduct research at NPE increasing the speed teams could access customersInformed a number of strategic pivots and sunset decisions based on insights from user research

Leveraged user research to develop an interactivity framework, catalyzing a two-year roadmap for new features in Stories, which boosted growth by over 15%.Played a key role in shaping the product strategy for Stories, contributing to its growth to over 1 billion daily active users.Pioneered initial user research that defined the minimum viable product for music integration on the Instagram platform.Generated critical insights that guided the launch strategy for the 'Close Friends' feature.

Team lead for complex multi-disciplinary projects (teams have included industrial designers, engineers, interaction designers, communication designers and business designers). Responsibilities include leading teams and clients through Smart Design’s innovation process, conducting and managing all user research activities (recruitment, planning and protocol development, moderation), developing key strategic insights to drive design and business solutions, offering definition, presentation and workshop facilitation, project management and stakeholder management. Internal responsibilities include junior staff mentorship, growing strategy group capabilities, pitch and proposal development, thought leadership.