Leadership & Strategy
I’ve spent the past 12 years working to understand users, find just the right set of ideas, and bring them to life. End-to-end coverage takes more than one person though, and bringing everyone together into one powerful team is an incredibly rewarding challenge.
Human-Centered Vision
Uncovering User Perspectives
Give the people what they want. I find that teams (including clients) limit the greatness of their solutions if they limit themselves to their own opinions. I apply a wide range of research methods from current-state usability testing to focus groups to contextual inquiry, all to deliver the answers that can serve as the North Star for developing and prioritizing offerings. This not only provides answers straight from the users’ mouths, but can also help to resolve gridlock or contention over key decisions.
Defining Product/Service Direction
Stakeholder collaboration and workshops are key here. I can lead your team to developing current- and ideal-state journey maps, service blueprints, strategic roadmaps, product briefs, and conceptual artwork to ensure clear alignment on the finished product and its support structure. These activities can be complex to set up and run, but I’ve found it to be something of a specialty; it’s a real rush to see it all come together.
Building Brand Identities
Bringing offerings to life hinges in part on a holistic, cohesive brand experience. I’ve worked with and led top-shelf designers, content authors, and strategists to establish all aspects of identities covering the visual, the verbal, and the experiential. Through moodboards, brand guides, and design systems we can accelerate downstream work while establishing a truly unified and inspiring presence.
Translating Strategy into Delivery
Feature Prioritization
Nothing’s a priority if everything’s a priority (sorry, I just love a good cliché). I use collaborative exercises to combine user, business, and technical perspectives into a full view of feasibility, projected effort, relative value, and risk. All of these inform a well-rounded delivery plan. I use an open approach through activities such as affinity mapping and relative estimation, going the extra mile to resolve unknowns that could cloud the picture.
Project & Program Planning
Planning for delivery is rarely as simple as it seems. Whether agile, waterfall, or some hybrid, I have extensive experience in assembling effort estimates, timelines, backlogs, milestones, and more. I also have extensive experience with managing delivery tasks, sprints, and epics in tools like JIRA, Smartsheet, Harvest, and Microsoft Project.
Kickoff Preparation
Projects depend on everyone being informed and aligned from the very beginning. Using a combination of domain onboarding, detailed briefs, and early team collaboration, I can get team members on the same page from day one. That’s not all though; shared resources and distributed teams can add logistical complications. I’ve done quite well at taking these factors into account when planning resource allocations and work milestones.
Design, Refine, Build & Deliver
Analysis & Conceptual Design
My earliest assignments were primarily business analysis work. I’ve held onto that analytical mindset, pairing it with design thinking to ensure the team has strong guidance. And through workshops, collaborative reviews, heuristics, and co-creation, I act as a sort of conductor as we together produce initial concepts and get stakeholder buy-in.
Detail Design & Dev Preparation
With conceptual design providing a high-level framework, I work with my team to delve deep into the plentiful minutiae needed for a successful end result. We use flows, architecture diagrams, wireframes, comps, style guides, and more to optimize every element and interaction, all the while working hand-in-hand with clients, developers, analysts, and others.
Cross-Functional Support
One thing I’m not is a developer. But I’ve worked with some awesome devs, architects, and data scientists. Not to mention specialists in QA, analytics, and SEO. From the point of dev handoff, my role is to ensure these people are getting everything my team can provide to set them up for success, all the way through go-live.
Optimizing Post-Deployment
It’s a common mistake that “go-live” equals “done.” It’s critical to continue to gather feedback, track analytics, and prioritize ongoing support. It’s also important to suspend disbelief. We should impartially and scientifically look at how to capitalize on wins and remedy losses. I work with teams to triage and address unexpected issues and further refine as we learn from a solution’s time in the wild.
Happy Teams = Better Teams
Leadership Means Service
I prefer to see myself more as a leader than a manager. On a practical level, there’s plenty of the latter, of course. But I take it to heart that I’m the center of a support system for my teammates. Whether informing, overseeing, reviewing, or getting my hands dirty with a challenging problem, I want to enable them to feel the pride of doing their best work and know that someone has their backs.
Finding & Developing Talent
Since becoming a discipline lead, I’ve had great success in finding and hiring incredible talent (see the Teammates page for some examples). I find people whom I can trust are motivated to do quality work. By treating the team as a learning environment and providing additional training opportunities, I allow each member to benefit from shared experiences and become stronger contributors as a result.
Efficient Delivery with Work-Life Balance
It’s common to find teams where people are working overtime every week. Or to have “crunch time” ahead of delivery. I choose not to normalize these situations. They cause burnout, lead to turnover, and erode the quality of work. To me, a leader should be accountable. So it’s on me to understand and remedy the causes of these issues and make sure that the next round better balances schedule demands with people’s lives.
Stronger Teams through Culture
Think about it: the people we work with are those we are closest to for at least 40 hours every week. That could be close to 2000 hours per year. How are we relating to each other? What are we doing together? How do we drive camaraderie, morale, and commitment to our craft? By selecting the right people and addressing each of these questions through action (not just words), the teams I’ve worked with have achieved more than the sum of their parts.