Design Ops and Product Operations management

Industry Experience

Sometimes It's Amazing LLC -Design and Product Ops Consultancy

Owner (Founded Aug 2019)

• Managed client and vendor relationship for the redesign of OldCityDistrict.com.

• Design Program Manager with UX research and design firm Chamjari on it’s redesign of GRAMMY.org and two confidential Fortune 500 clients

Change.org

Sr Product Operations Manager (Nov 2021 - Jun 2023 · 1 yr 8 mos)

• Worked across product teams to streamline documentation and communication
  Owns OKR review and approval process for Product Development org.

• Led vetting and relationship with UX design and research vendor U+ for generative research studies

• Owned sitewide accessibility audit and drove WCAG 2.1 screenreader improvements

Amazon.com

Senior UX Program Manager, Retail Shopping Design (Mar 2014 - Jul 2019 · 5 yrs 5 mos)

• In 2018-2019, managed studio operations for Amazon’s core shopping design team, with focus on workload management for product evaluation and retail platform designers.

• Owned partner engagement between core shopping design team and over sixty teams
  leveraging our platform design components to add features to the product detail page.

• In 2016-2017, led the Human Interface Guidelines program, evangelizing Amazon's twenty years of tribal design knowledge. Worked with partner teams to build a consistent and delightful experience across desktop and mobile platforms.

• In 2015, worked cross-functionality across Amazon to solve customers' long-time shopper frustrations through deployment of better user experiences and design backed by three years of research.

• In 2014, acted as point of contact and project coordinator between Amazon’s Universal Shopping Experience designers and mobile product managers. Primarily focused on design for Amazon’s shopping app for Android, IOS and Amazon’s FireOS devices.

• Worked on integrating digital goods purchasing into Amazon’s app for Android, merging design patterns and user experiences from Amazon Instant Video, Audible, Amazon Music and other Amazon apps into the Amazon shopping app. Maintained high bar for design and holistic user experience while serving digital business strategy.

Apollo Group

Manager of User Experience Team Operations (Dec 2011 - Feb 2014 · 2 yrs 3 mos)

• Served as Chief of Staff for Senior Director of User Experience, managing operations for a staff of 27 software designers, front-end developers and user experience researchers.

• Maintained big picture view of product integration among learning products and platforms. Includes state-of-the-art eCampus classroom, mobile applications, career services offerings for students and employers and personalized learning tools.

• Coordinated schedules, assignments and deployment of team resources. Responsible for time-to-market velocity without sacrificing quality.

• Facilitated effective cross-functional communication between User Experience team, Product and Business sponsors and Engineering development teams.

• Ensures all product stakeholders possess clear, single vision of product design requirements.

• Promoted user centric product design principles in UX research and development practices across the company.

What is DesignOps?

How Facebook describes DesignOps, or Design Program Management (DPM):

“Simply put, bringing on a DPM can offer design teams a level of specialization that can drive them to the next level of performance.

DPMs, meanwhile, can suss out problems when they’re small and ensure they are handled and corrected before they become a crises.

They can gather baseline quantitative figures, track them over time, measure improvement, tweak existing tools and processes in response, and flag when it’s time to bring on the right resources.

They can recommend how to structure critiques that have more impact. They can let you know when the team is getting burned out and help lend support or set up a team movie date.”

What I offer:

UX producing

• Find the gaps in communication and close them by partnering closely with product, business and UX stakeholders together

• Time management: eliminate waste, automate key tasks, and reprioritize for impact

• Create knowledge base, maintain and evangelize project’s best practices and tools

• Track and drive progress towards business objectives — immediate and big picture

• Lead backlog grooming

Research producing

• Optimize researcher time for recruiting, conducting studies and analyzing results

• Ensure research questions directly correlate to product and business objectives

• Evangelize research findings and guide synthesizing them into actionable next steps for non-researchers.

• Organize findings into its most consumable form

Customer advocacy

• Utilize frameworks like Amazon’s “Working Backwards” process to identify customer needs and the solutions they really want

Inc. on Amazon’s Working Backwards process:

“[It] begins by working backwards from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for a product and trying to bolt customers onto it."

"Internal press releases are centered around the customer problem, how current solutions (internal or external) fail, and how the new product will blow away existing solutions.”

“If the benefits listed don't sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then perhaps they're not (and shouldn't be built).”

• Use research findings to center product development on what improves the customer experience

• Champion opportunities found by research to increase the “delight” of using the product

• Advocate for usability and accessibility over brand marketing need