Offerings & Services

Let’s work together

Hire me to collaboratively define and tackle your top product priorities, visually align stakeholders, and up-level your team along the way.

Together we’ll clarify business goals, research and plan out a viable path to implementation, and collaborate on team processes to get this and future projects done.

Why work with me

I’ve solved a wide range of design and research problems over the past 15 years, at new startups and established companies, as a design team of one and as the team builder, across a range of industries and countries.

My past 15 years I’ve spent

working at 4 startups, 1 enterprise, 2 consultancies;
with teams in US, Japan, Armenia, Singapore, Qatar, and India;
building 4 consumer products (4 years) and 1 enterprise platform (7 years)
across industries of regulated healthcare, social media, crowdsourced translation, video streaming,and internationalization projects.

Three times I’ve been the founding designer, and three times I’ve built or managed the design team.

I am especially passionate about hiring process design, pair designing, cross-team collaboration, security usability, design localization, and asynchronous & remote coordination.

**Why not me?**

There are also some good reasons why my experiences may not be an automatic fit for your needs. While my strengths include the ability to dive into new domains and leverage that outside perspective as I ramp up, there are areas where my lack of experience may be relevant.

Larger bureaucracies. I’ve spent most of my career in smaller organizations (<20 design teams, <500 org size), so while my insights will still be relevant to scaled organizations, navigating bureaucracies is not my most practiced skill.
Change management at scale. Identifying and solving operational and cultural inefficiencies I can do, but I am not the person to roll out a slow, phased, effort to change employee behavior across a large organization.

Services offered

Strategic scoping workshop

Project inception, scoping, prioritization.

What is it. A one-day workshop to align on a project’s goals, scope, and outline, modeled on Pivotal Labs’ project inception.

Approach. Bring your team together to share current goals, anti-goals, research knowledge, existing ideas, and key milestones. Use the workshop to synthesize a shared high level vision across your stakeholders.

Outcome. A story map (walking skeleton) of your project roadmap, along with team alignment on its priority and scope. Optional: a backlog of defined experiments to (in)validate the biggest risks to your premise or product.

Holistic design project

Digital products, service blueprinting, and information architecture.

What is it. Soup-to-nuts product and service design, taking business goals and customer needs, and facilitating alignment across stakeholder groups through research and iteration towards final delivery. A holistic and comprehensive approach, from strategic direction through execution.

Approach. First, we talk about your needs. Then, I work directly with your existing team to practice hands-on research, ruthless prioritization and scoping, and iteration towards delivery.

Outcome. A clear vision of the product’s direction and next steps, and alignment within the team on the goals and approaches to get there. Direct involvement from planning through implementation, as appropriate.

Design team coaching

What is it. Working directly with your team to up-level their processes and team dynamic.

Approach. I will engage with your team by collaborating with them on their work, providing mentorship along the way.

Outcome. You will get an evaluation of the team and strategic recommendations to support team development. Your team will get hands-on practice with different design processes and mentorship.

Executive team education

What it is. Understanding product design, it’s range of skills and competencies, overall process.

Approach. Presentation to leadership about design role and processes. Get your hands dirty together by participating in select team activities. Join regular team share-outs

Outcome. Alignment between leadership and design team about