About Me
Passionate about researching, designing and evaluating experiences people have interacting with products, services and organizations. I bring focus to improving the design and innovation process itself as well, by building a supportive and open mindset culture and fostering creativity and imagination while maintaining a structure of accountability for results.
I want to help you build your innovation culture.
· Human-Centered Design/Design Thinking Expertise: I live, breath and teach human-centered design to foster the creation of better products, services, processes and strategies, as well as a competitive and inspiring long-term vision. The most important components for a successful direction are asking the right questions, appropriately defining the problem and business opportunity, and researching and testing critical assumptions.
· Lean Startup/Lean UX Advocate & Lead: I am a strong believer in organizations of any size practicing entrepreneurial management to get to effective solutions more quickly and drive long-term growth and innovation. Developing a baseline product that can adequately demonstrate benefit to a customer, testing it strategically, and making iterative improvements based on feedback is the core of an effective design process. Making sure that process can thrive is at the core of successful design initiatives.
· Coaching Leader: Having worked with matrix teams in both startups and large organizations, I have solid experience leading the exploration of new opportunities, challenging assumptions and focusing direction, and enriching the knowledge base of junior and peer team members in UX and lean startup methods. I am always looking for new ways to stimulate and support the co-development of positive, creative, and diverse high-performing teams.
· Relationship Builder: Previous positions have involved working with and building relationships with large cross-functional teams and stakeholders ranging from 30-40 people. VP’s, Directors, Business Analysts, Product Managers, Project Managers, Technical Architects, Developers, and external vendors. As a design lead, it’s important to continually support open team communication and ensure there is a shared vision with all stakeholders of current work objectives and long-term goals.
· Creative Critical Thinker and Storyteller: My creative and critical thinking education and experience give me an open mindset and additional perspective in all aspects of the innovation process – researching, interviews, understanding context, developing insights, evaluating tradeoffs, defining opportunities, energizing my team to investigate innovative solutions, testing assumptions and prototypes efficiently and effectively and clearly communicating results and value propositions to stakeholders in an engaging way. It is critical to develop the right solution, but it is equally vital that the story of that solution is able to persuade, influence and engage a variety of audiences in order to ensure success.
· Tech-Savvy: I have strong programming knowledge and experience that makes me an effective liaison with technical teams and learn new technical concepts, constraints, and tools quickly and easily. I enjoy the challenge of keeping up with the speed of technological change and talking shop with developers.
· Professional Growth Focused: Looking forward to starting a part-time MBA program at Temple in 2018 to expand my knowledge and experience in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management. I also enjoy supporting junior and peer co-workers in finding and following their own personal and professional growth goals.
· Happiness Champion: Research shows that happy teams are more productive and solve more complex challenges. I make it a goal to laugh with my coworkers daily. Enjoying the work we do is a critical component for creative and successful teams and having fun working together is a very effective way to deal with the stress of our daily lives.