Managed and mentored a 5-member team of strategists, designers, and researchers who were conducting moonshot innovation projects for our business partners.Established a design playbook and held weekly office hours to support cross-team collaboration and mentorship, fostering a culture of continuous learning within Cisco's Lifecycle Transformation Design team.

Collaborated with business partners to identify potential projects, align on business outcomes, and guide partners through user-centered design processes.Formed design teams for projects, guiding them in their collaboration, their application of design processes and tools, and their interactions and presentations with stakeholders.Designed and facilitated workshops (both in-person and online) to help cross-functional teams plan their projects around the user's experience.

As Director of Design Practice, I created a new vertical business for Pragmatic, supported with three new product courses. Using product management and user-centered design techniques, I established the business strategy for our design offerings. I conducted research with our target audiences to understand the knowledge and skills they required to maximize the impact of design within their organizations. Based on that research, I developed content and learning experiences to bring the curriculum to life, including workshops, activities, templates, and learning guides. Using these materials, I taught product managers and designers the mindsets, tools, and benefits of user-centered design.Product Achievements:* Created the course "Design" for product managers, teaching them how to best collaborate with their design partners to create products that exceed user expectations. The new course introduced new levels of student interactivity, outpaced the net promoter scores of existing courses, and exceeded revenue targets by 160% in the first year of delivery.* Created the course "Business Strategy + Design" for designers, teaching them tools and mindsets to help them collaborate with their business partners. The course enables designers to participate in strategic conversations around competitive strategy, product portfolio investments, and business metrics.* Contributed to the course "Strategic Storytelling" for designers, teaching them effective methods for achieving design goals through storytelling for a variety of internal audiences.

Taught and mentored designers and their cross-functional collaborators in the application of design tools, processes and techniques in multi-day interactive learning workshops. Workshops included Design Thinking, UX Design, Service Design, Design Research Techniques, Design Leadership, and Workshop Facilitation.Facilitated weeklong UX and Service Design bootcamps, in which student teams designed solutions for a partner nonprofit organization. Students interviewed stakeholders and users, synthesized their research to create personas, and explored problems and solutions with narrative tools including journey maps, storyboards, and bodystorming. Coached student teams through the process, including the final presentation of their designs to the nonprofit’s stakeholders.Designed and led multi-day innovation workshops for client teams to push their thinking forward using design thinking and service design techniques. Workshop outcomes included a set of target personas, journey maps, product concepts and storyboards. Clients worked in a variety of industries, including healthcare, education, and consumer packaged goods.Created and facilitated a 3-day workshop for design practitioners across Designit to practice and hone their workshop facilitation skills.Quickly pivoted delivery of in-person courses to online delivery, moving interactive delivery and activities to Zoom and Miro, in an effort to ensure continuing revenue streams throughout the pandemic.

Led design teams on client projects across a variety of industries including healthcare, technology infrastructure, banking and finance, higher education, and consumer packaged goods.Managed client stakeholder relationships and communications, from the sales cycle through research, design, and delivery.Coached new design practitioners on our product and service design practices, including user research, research synthesis, persona construction, narrative framing, ideation, user interface framework sketching, low-fidelity prototyping, user testing, and workshop design and facilitation.

Applied human-centered design techniques to strategic design projects for client organizations in a broad variety of applications, including financial services, electronic medical records, data analytics, bank fraud investigation, social networking apps, education software, and consumer electronics.Conducted qualitative user research in a variety of work and home settings.Defined target personas, usage scenarios, and task workflows to drive product design.Designed and documented innovative software interfaces.Planned and led workshops for project kickoffs, stakeholder alignment, brand experience, research synthesis, concept ideation, opportunity prioritization, and interactive design reviews.Coached client teams in user-centered design, bringing them along throughout our process, including key collaboration points in user research, persona creation, scenario writing, and user interface sketching.

Led product creation as the agile product owner, coordinating product development across five different scrum teams.

As interaction designer, I defined the UX design practices at this engineering-led technical infrastructure startup. Integrating user research practices, personas, and scenarios into our process, I helped the engineering staff to better understand our target users and their needs. Responsible for interface wireframes and clickable prototypes to solicit user feedback and guide development efforts.

Ensured the software programming tools we created met or exceeded user expectations, by writing specifications based on an analysis of user tasks, by building sample applications to provide product feedback, and by interviewing beta users about their experience with the software.

Oversaw development of a technical training curriculum of 14 courses for our enterprise application development tools, including Java (J2EE), EAI, and Forte’s proprietary 4GL.Created courses to teach developers programming techniques for distributed applications.Hired and managed a team of four curriculum developers.Co-managed the budget and revenue of the educational services department.

• Designed and wrote a 5-day course for Sybase's object-oriented 4GL development tool