Duration

April 2019 - present

TEAM

5 Product Designers

Design Direction

I’ve been managing a team of 5 highly-talented, full-stack IC Product Designers. Leading design direction in fulfilling our quarterly roadmap initiatives and ongoing UX enhancements. Working to improve design processes and product team collaboration. Mentoring and guiding my designers in developing subject matter expertise (including research, design system, and design ops) beyond their primary product focus.

Additionally, I am supporting my system designer's mission in strengthening application of our Spekular Design System. We’ve worked together to develop a phased strategy for implementation, while driving consensus with Product and Engineering leadership to greenlight the effort. Goals include improving UX/UI consistency, increasing the product's accessibility compliance score, reducing design debt, streamlining process for front end developers, and scoping for incremental implementation.

All of the IC work below has been done by the product designers on my team. Much of the product foundation below was in place prior to my coming on-board at Reflektive.

Product Design Leadership

As Director of Product Design, I’m developing, leading, and managing new processes to improve communication and collaboration across the R&D organization – Product, Engineering, and Design.

• Leading exploration of the future design vision for Reflektive – collaborating with Product Managers to sequence it into production as part of regular sprint & scrum team work.

• Defining competencies and levels for designers. Providing clarity in evaluating promotion criteria for performance reviews.

• Creating and pitching design-led product initiatives each quarter for roadmap consideration. To date, these cross-product initiatives have included themes related to navigation and wayfinding, design system and UX pattern consistency, accessibility, delight, and customer guidance around best practices to support HR professionals’ use cases.

• Facilitating Product team workshops to consider and prioritize concerns around usability, engagement, discovery, customer lifecycle, and wayfinding.

Enhancing Research

Shortly after joining Reflektive, I partnered with CS to build and manage a pipeline for recruiting customer users into a formal user research program. Over 850 customer users opted into the program within the first 6 months. We dramatically enhanced our research efforts in subsequent quarters, with all designers owning and facilitating programs to validate product work. Reflektive has always valued research – but this infrastructure is increasing the available signal across all customer tiers and verticals. We now have a dedicated, ongoing research discipline.

Product Design Principles

Early in my engagement, I led my team in a Product Design Principles workshop. The team had been working in product silos. We needed unifying principles to inform our thinking, and clarify our understanding of "good design" at Reflektive.

Lead IC Design, Goals

I am lead designer on one of Reflektive's most important products, Goals. I partner with the Goals PMs to identify initiatives and product improvements, manage research efforts, design and validate concepts, and collaborate with engineering through production. I also served as an interim PM during one of the largest Goals product update releases in company history.

Lead IC Design, Reflektive Gmail Add-on & Plugin

The Reflektive plugin is part of our critically important "Reflektive where you are" product strategy. The plugin allows users to access key functionality in their email client, without having to go into the web app. A significant percentage of our customer base regularly uses the plugin, although it hasn't been updated in years and was functionally lacking in comparison to the web app. As lead IC designer, I worked with the PM to define scope, and have designed a completely new user experience. A robust, comparable alternative to the web app. Currently in-production.