Michaela Hackner Email & Phone Number

Austin, Texas, Us

I drive design excellence and innovation at Indeed through the orchestration of foundational UX capabilities. I lead multiple, specialized teams that collectively enable and scale UX quality across Indeed's global product ecosystem including:• Design Systems: Delivering a comprehensive component library that ensures consistent, accessible, branded experiences across marketing and product surfaces while accelerating design and engineering velocity.• UX Accessibility: Safeguarding inclusive user experiences and mitigating organizational risk through scalable accessibility standards and practices.• Research Operations: Connecting product teams with prospective users for generative and evaluative research, enabling data-informed decisions and de-risking big swings.• Coded Prototyping: Enabling rapid validation of new concepts through high-fidelity prototypes powered by real data.• UX Operations: Connecting the dots across UX teams through collaboration initiatives while driving operational excellence through strategic oversight of UX tools, budgets, upskilling initiatives, and career rubric evolution.Additionally, my organization serves as Indeed's UX transformation arm, advancing AI integration and new ways of working, evolving how our designers approach their craft to meet the future of work.

Austin, Texas, Us

I introduced, secured funding, and established a global UX and research operations practice to supercharge the Indeed UX Community, which consists of 500+ professionals spanning 5 design disciplines, embedded within 6 businesses, across 9 countries. We developed programs that enable UXers to better design for Indeedians, job seekers, and employers while also driving alignment, de-risking business decisions, generating efficiencies, and elevating UX quality.• As UX’s primary contact with HR, IT, Finance, Legal, and Operations, I convened and drove consensus across the UX leadership team, and led key cross-business initiatives that strengthened the practice of UX and improved organizational culture.• Partnering with multiple businesses, I grew our team from 1 to 18 people in twelve months, by building trust—resulting in the centralization of 4 Res Ops teams—and developing business cases for 7 additional roles.• Convened multiple businesses’ finance teams to centralize the budget and governance of 12 UX tools under my team, and oversaw software optimization for UX—and the greater R&D organization—to streamline our toolset and right-size contracts, resulting in $2.3M in savings.• Transformed the Legal-UX relationship—and the Legal organization as a whole—by conducting and socializing an organizational assessment that ultimately influenced Legal to rethink their company-wide engagement model and update multiple policies blocking UX work.• Established a bi-annual UX health survey and oversaw the development of comprehensive health metrics we monitor on a quarterly basis. In our first year, UX attrition dropped by 6% and there were 10-20%+ increases in UX culture, enablement, cross-team awareness, and connectedness indicators.• Standardized Res Ops processes across 4 of my teams to elevate participant recruitment quality, handle higher volume, and predict capacity, which enabled us to deliver 26% more recruits after a RIF when we lost 1/2 of the team.

Using design to make the world a better place, specializing in organizational and service design, design strategy, content design, and coaching for designers and design leaders.

San Francisco, California, Us

As COS to the VP of design, I built a design and research operations practice that supported a rapidly growing team of 60+ designers by establishing culture, systems, standards, and tools that increased productivity and enabled them to deliver world-class experiences for Upwork users.• Consulted 45 cross-functional stakeholders to develop a design and research ops strategy, and my team delivered key milestones in the first 6 months including quarterly portfolio planning and work tracking, an inclusive approach to contract team members, an Ops intake process, new hire onboarding, team and manager playbooks, communication, meeting, and budget rituals, a research recruitment process, and three virtual offsite events.• Starting in my first week, I led our Invision to Figma migration process saving the business $70k a year.• Introduced time-bound work and rolled out a UX-wide, work tracking framework in Jira that reduced churn, offered visibility into velocity and output, and empowered managers to identify gaps and make trade-offs.• Overhauled the research recruitment process to better scale the expertise of the UX research team and tripled the number of users designers, product managers, and marketers connected with each week. • Oversaw the program management of our UX Vision portfolio of work, including an end-to-end overhaul of product UI and the systems and frameworks to support that upgrade.

Chicago, Il, Us

As a member of the design leadership team, I partnered with five business units to operationalize and scale the strategic practice of UX, content design, and user research by leading executive-level design efforts that infused design thinking into our company culture, and managing the user research and content design teams.• Introduced, developed the business case, and built a content design team that designed intuitive and relevant UI copy across our products, increasing user understanding and trust in our brand. • Optimized, scaled, and democratized the practices of content design and user research across the product organization in lean and creative ways that arm teams with additional tools to advance design.• Redesigned the purpose and mandate of the user research team to lead strategic, discovery research to inform product and business strategy, and scaled the practice of usability testing through designers.• Made design workshops the go-to approach for solving complex business problems by establishing design thinking practices, coaching senior stakeholders, and demonstrating value through high-profile projects.• Regularly surfaced user insights to uncover design opportunities to further empower users and drive business outcomes, and defined strategies to unite cross-functional partners in support of them.• Advanced the practice of more thoughtful UX decisions across our product suite by providing design direction to UX and visual designers in weekly, business reviews to ensure they’re grounding decisions in data, leveraging existing patterns, and effectively addressing a clear user problem.• Championed the professional growth and impact of designers by prioritizing high-impact work, introducing service design techniques, and advocating for their careers.

Mclean, Va, Us

I built and led a content strategy team that designed conversations with bank customers in-app, online, and in branches.• Managed and led a team of content strategists where I set the vision of our work to advance the business’ strategy and coached stakeholders on the value and application of content design through relationship-building, high-profile projects, and delivering positive business outcomes.• Increased customer retention by driving the research, design, and strategy around how we handled branch closures to anticipate customer needs and address pain points proactively.• Drove digital adoption of our banking tools, which reduced call volume by 25% and saved the business $175,000/year.• Improved NPS by designing more transparent overdraft policies that warned customers before they overspent their accounts, and offered quick ways for them to deposit money through texts and emails.• Strengthened long-term banking relationships by operationalizing and scaling the design of a pilot effort in Capital One Cafes to have meaningful 1:1 conversations about money. After leading a formalization project, business partners increased investment in the effort and Coaches had over 500 conversations with customers in its first 6 months.

Documentary portraiture and fine art photographer in the Washington, D.C. Metro area.

Arlington, Virginia, Us

Over my nearly seven years at Forum One, I led and managed cross-functional teams to design human-centered web experiences for client organizations—first as a Product Manager and Product (creative) Director, and then by building a content strategy practice. • Developed and oversaw relationships with a portfolio of clients that included the American Red Cross, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Centers for Disease Control, and the Technology Ministry of Qatar, and was responsible for and exceeded an annual sales target of $500,000 by 200%.• Introduced approaches from design thinking and content design to scope and facilitate web strategy discussions with client stakeholders for over 20 web redesigns, then led a team of designers and technologists to complete that work using lean and agile methods.• Delivered engaging digital experiences that prioritized organizational impact by balancing tight timelines and budgets, while relentlessly advocating for end-users. • Built a business case and a client pipeline to support the creation of a content strategy practice that I led.

Arlington, Virginia, Us

Arlington, Virginia, Us

Washington, Dc, Us

At World Learning, I led the organization’s digital communications strategy and the experience design for all of our web outposts. • Led the redesign of the global website by defining the information architecture and site structure, designing page layouts and hierarchy, and building out templates in RedDot CMS to scale these decisions.• Built relationships with and coached program leaders across the organization to create compelling and engaging experiences for their audiences through the use of online storytelling. • Defined the strategy for and managed multiple social media channels to promote success stories, including conceiving of and launching World Learning’s official blog.

Washington, District Of Columbia, Us

During my time at Pact, I lived in Cambodia and Kenya where I helped stand up community lending circles and literacy programs for disadvantaged women as part of Pact’s WORTH Program. This involved developing and delivering training materials, creating a monitoring and evaluation plan, and leading the program's communications strategy by capturing and publishing stories about the amazing women in the program.

Washington, D.C., Us

As an analyst, I studied global humanitarian and food crisis situations and drafted policy recommendations for foreign aid intervention. I also briefed policy leaders and conducted long-term research on humanitarian issues and trends. Issue areas included Liberia, Haiti, and the Southeast Asia region.

I designed and developed knowledge management solutions and marketing websites for government clients.

I designed and developed web sites for government clients. I leveraged usability and interactive design best practices, developed information architecture, and created visual interfaces with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

Mclean, Va, Us

I managed web and multimedia projects, developed multimedia presentations in Macromedia Director, designed web sites, and created interfaces and graphics for CD-ROMs and the Internet.

Ma, Communication, Culture And Technology

Ba, Letters, Arts And Sciences (Self-Designed Major In Writing And Web Design).