Work
The only measure of my work as a design leader is how well I’ve enabled others to achieve their best—with, through, and by design.
I am honored to have contributed to the career growth of dozens of colleagues. I’ve also launched two impactful design orgs from scratch, led hundreds of successful design projects, launched several products, and co-created solutions with numerous non-designers.
By the numbers
20
years of design experience
10
years in design management
4
years managing managers
2
design orgs from scratch
A few examples
For the past several years, my focus has been on creating the conditions for others to do great design work, and to ensure that design is supporting the outcomes that matter most for clients and organizations. The following examples illustrate some of my design leadership work over the past several years.
Core Experience Platform
Client: Division of Information Technology, UW-Madison | Years: 2013-2020 | Roles: Research, Design, Strategy
MyUW is the experience platform that students, faculty, and staff at UW-Madison use to access personalized and useful content. Beginning in 2013, we gathered user and stakeholder needs to better understand context and usage scenarios, evaluated usage analytics, and developed an experience vision. In 2014, we launched a streamlined and mobile-friendly experience platform, and then iterated continuously over the next several years adding new features and improving underlying data structures for more precise personalization. The MyUW product was a strategic first design project, giving us a design and technical foundation on which to explore and deliver increasingly impactful results for students and staff.
MyUW Student Portal 2013
MyUW Student Portal 2014
MyUW Student Portal 2016
First Year Experience Design Collaborations
Client
Center for First Year Experience, UW-Madison
Years
2018-2019
Roles
Design Director, Workshop Facilitator
There’s loads of evidence for how important the first year at college is for helping students get oriented and find their footing to make the most of their undergraduate experience. We knew from students, advisors, and parents that there was a lot we could improve upon at UW-Madison, for both residential and fully online students. Given how many stakeholders converged in this space, it was crucial to work closely and collectively even though different officers were more accustomed to working in parallel. Through a series of well-planned design sprints and other workshops, we got everyone in the same room, seeing and thinking about the problem space together to co-create a better future state. This work paved the way for multi-year efforts to design a more supportive experience for first year students.
Design Community
Client: Better by Design and UW-Madison | Years: 2015-Present | Roles: Founder, Manager, Community Member
Our world benefits tremendously from people who think, work, and act like designers.
People that ask great questions, listen intently, communicate clearly, design for every one, make connections across complexity, see the the art of the possible, and evolve over time in response to feedback. And yet, design can be lonely work. There are often too few of us carrying too much water in environments that may not value our contributions.
For these reasons, I’m honored to have been a part of finding and growing design community, confidence, and capability via the Better by Design conference and UW-Madison design community. Both were and continue to be lively and enriching spaces with a mix a mix of amazing people, incredible speakers, new ideas, and a much-needed sense of possibility.
Time lapse video of workshop participants working together around large post-it notes.