West Monroe
Director, Product Design
2022 - 2024
I joined West Monroe through the acquisition of Carbon Five and served as a Director in the newly formed Product Experience & Engineering Lab.
I helped our C5 team transition into West Monroe, established early relationships across organizations, and helped define the career model and career ladder for the new ~400 person product group. In addition to client projects and business development, my focus was delivery excellence and methodology. I was part of the team tasked with defining WM's new product offerings. As part of this initiative, I designed and led for product practitioners as well as firm-wide training for our extended sales and consultant colleagues.
As a Director of Design specifically, I helped lead the discipline, bringing Carbon Five's successful process to scale while helping build a studio culture. I introduced discipline-wide retros that were key to supporting junior designers, and peer mentoring to support senior and principal designers.
Carbon Five
Director of Design
2009 - 2022
I joined Carbon Five as the first designer on staff and eventually served as Director of Design, helping grow both the team and the role of design within the organization. I led by doing — balancing hands-on design with mentorship, and strengthening the bridge between our design, product and engineering disciplines.
I became a nerd and steward for our process, making key contributions to how we approached discovery, kickoffs, and cross-functional collaboration. I introduced the practice of producing Kickoff Findings decks as a fast-follow artifact for clients and established our first repository of methods. I also started and led the Process Practice Group, where I focused on documenting, teaching, and evolving our ways of working.
I played a key role in the evolution of Carbon Five’s product and design culture, helping shape our design practice from a team of one into a strong, integrated discipline that worked hand-in-hand with product and engineering.
Radar Networks
Senior UX Designer
2008 - 2009
Radar Networks was an early-stage semantic web startup that was acquired by Evri.
I led UX design for Twine beta, a personalized, interest-based news aggregator. I concepted new features, evolved the product brand, defined interaction patterns, and contributed to research and usability initiatives.
Towards the end of my time at Radar, Carbon Five was brought on as a "hail mary" to try and right the ship. This was my introduction to the rigor and clear process brought by Carbon Five. I worked closely with the engineers from Carbon Five on Twine 2.0. They reached out when a project from IDEO came to C5's doorstep and they needed someone to translate designs for the developers.
Rocket Communications
Senior Visual Designer
2004 - 2005
I provided end-to-end visual design support for both startups and enterprise teams. I helped define visual language needs and translate corporate branding into product-level expression. I created visual and brand guidelines, wrote heuristic evaluations, and designed and facilitated visual language workshops. I also produced visual assets for web and desktop applications, including UI elements, icon sets, splash screens, and cohesive visual systems.
As my career has progressed and I've moved more towards strategy and leadership, I've occasionally been asked if I can do highly visual work or "make illustrations". A project at Rocket to design digital snowglobes (with parallax and working floaters) puts that to rest. Yes, I can draw, even if I spend more of my time in "boxes and arrows land" untangling complexity now.
Rocket also marked my first foray into consulting, the art of working with clients and navigating client expectations.
Sun Microsystems
Senior Visual Designer
1997 - 2004
I started my career at Sun Microsystems during the height of the dot-com boom, fresh out of college with degrees in computer science and art. I worked alongside seasoned designers and engineers, designing for Solaris, contributing to Sun’s HCI guidelines, and developing tools used by system administrators around the world. Sun was the perfect place to learn.
Over time, I stepped into a senior role, leading visual design for system management tools and the GNOME desktop. I collaborated closely with engineering and branding teams, delivered large-scale icon systems, and learned how to deliver in highly technical environments.
My time at Sun was the beginning of a constant throughout my career: showing up as a creative mind to collaborate with people who think in code. I learned to ask better questions, hold my own in complex spaces, and become a translator between ideas, people, and systems. That skill has helped me lead teams, guide strategy, and bring complex products to life.
Jazz Singing
A (serious) side pursuit
I’ve learned tons about collaboration, leading groups, persuasion, thinking on my toes and making quick connections on the fly from my experience performing on stage. Around 2004, I began studying jazz vocals and I regularly perform professionally. All of the experiences I've encountered on the bandstand inform and improve my design, collaboration and facilitation skills.
You can find my music on Apple Music • Spotify • my website
