I'll tell you mine, if you tell me yours.

I'm a dedicated and passionate creative leader interested in inspiring disruptive innovation and beautifully executed design solutions. I seek to find the delicate balance between structure, flexibility, and chaos needed to support the creative process.  

Most recently, I was a Senior Design Manager at Atlassian where I led cross-functional teams in solving complex challenges across the customer self-help and support journey. During my tenure I shaped organizational design decisions, envisioned the future strategy for end-to-end customer help, and up leveled the user-centered service design craft.

I took a long and circuitous journey before landing my role at the world's leading collaboration software company. After graduating with a painting degree from The University of Houston Honors College, I spent an entire year crying myself to sleep, unsure of the direction to take my life, career, and passions. Ultimately, the desire to elicit emotional connections between people and their world led me to start a career designing immersive exhibition experiences for Holocaust Museum Houston and The Rwanda Project. I went on to complete the Masters in Advertising program at The University of Texas at Austin where I created award-winning fake ads. Putting my skills into practice, I spent five years working in digital advertising, creating strategic campaigns for a variety of clients, before making my way into product design and creative management. I now lead multidisciplinary teams through the human-centered design process, infusing my spirited drive for design excellence and love of storytelling in order to inspire collaborative innovation.

In addition to leading experienced teams, I have also worked with enterprise clients to help build and scale user-centered design capabilities within their organizations by teaching, training, and inspiring internal teams on design thinking methodologies. Through a "learn by doing" collaborative, I have successfully lead clients through a variety of design challenges based on a user-centered design framework. 

Central to my creative approach, is broadening my definition of human-centered design to not only focus on building empathy for our users, but also for each other. I continually seek to understand the complexities of human relationships in order to better understand myself so that I can mentor, manage, and challenge the status quo.  

For me, challenging what I see isn’t about controversial instigation, but rather, a way to start a discourse on how we can design a better world. It's about fostering a vision for design excellence to help inspire, retain, and attract top talent. Ultimately, it’s about being a really great designer.

Learn more about how I got to where I am by reading my interview with frog’s DesignMind.