Design Leadership
Throughout my career, I have focused on building strong design culture, fostering strategic design and developing relationships with product management and engineering peers.
Building Design Culture
Many of my roles have involved building a strong design culture and, often, entire design teams from scratch. I enjoy the process of recruiting designers, defining a team vision and setting the seed for a design culture. I have led teams of visual designers, UX designers and researchers in both small and large companies.
Fostering Strategic Design
When I began running ideation workshops with clients at POP, I worked with colleagues to define a series of ideation exercises. The exercises were designed to focus on strategic design. I have incorporated a similar approach in my roles at Microsoft, Amazon and Google. While at Office 365, I created a series of studio-wide ideation sessions in which designers, researchers and product managers ideated around 2-3 topics. When leading the enterprise apps team at Amazon, I led teams through ideation sessions to define a vision for apps. Over the years, I have been able to hone my facilitation and ideation skills and I believe in the power of strategic design to produce strong design culture and engaging customer experiences.
POP clients participating in a discovery exercise.
A team member interacting with a touch UI paper prototype kit developed for discovery exercises.
Sketches from a team ideation session.
Developing Relationships
As a design leader, a large part of my role involves partnering with and influencing product management and engineering peers. A few years ago, I became interested in the topics of design thinking and design management. My interest led me to begin a Masters in Design Management from which I graduated in 2017. My final thesis was focused on factors required to integrate a design team within a technology company. Through my research, readings and interviews, I identified 5 core factors that should exist for a successful integration:
1. Trust
2. Executive support
3. Design and software development collaboration
4. Shared vision
5. Promotion of design value
I enjoy the collaboration between design, product management and engineering and I see it as an important part of a successful product development process.