Design Practice Lead, Kessel Run (USAF)
September 2023 - Present
Branch-level design leader for Wing Command and Control (C2) product line. Strategically focused on the enablement of designers and product managers across 3 portfolios and 9 teams. Educated product teams on best practices for agile product development. Strong focus on positive user outcomes, product team alignment, and skill building.
• Utilization of Digital University and Udemy to personally curate 10 learning paths for designers in topic areas including UX Research, Content Design, Accessibility, and more.
• Facilitated bi-weekly workshops in the creation of product artifacts that assist in determining better user outcomes. Workshop topics included journey mapping, storytelling, use of Artificial Intelligence, research planning, and more.
• Led enablement sessions with designers on topics of their choosing in order to ensure needs were being met and knowledge gaps eliminated.
• Devised and executed a system for skill evaluation of the designers that included upskilling opportunities, opening the door for advancement into subject matter expertise and utilization as org-wide assets.
Design Portfolio Lead, Kessel Run (USAF)
October 2021 - September 2023
Branch-level design leader for the All Domain Common Platform (ADCP) product line. Emphasis on the platform as a service, working with the design team on how to best serve the product teams deploying to the platform.
• Introduced product design principles to the platform product teams to help create a better service experience for platform users. Heavy focus on customer engagement and process simplification.
• Designed and executed a platform dashboard, simplifying the process for releasing a product in different environments, monitoring those releases and measuring their success based upon DORA metrics.
• Worked with the design team to create service blueprints, journey maps, and other artifacts that would illuminate problems in the current process of releasing to the platform. Workshopped potential solutions.
• Mentored a design team that had very limited opportunities for front end design work and improved their skills and abilities as service designers.
Design System Lead, Kessel Run (USAF)
September 2020 - September 2023
Portfolio-level design leader responsible for overseeing an organization-wide design system catering to the needs for 40+ product teams. Tasked with creating a more consistent user experience for tens of thousands of end users.
• Built and maintained Figma libraries featuring over 2000 icons, 200 components, and dozens of colors and fonts to increase wireframing efficiency.
• Released a design system documentation site for the design system’s coded components, highlighting best practices for implementation and open source contribution back to the system. Included robust code examples and code sandboxing in Typescript and Javascript.
• Trailblazed a path toward Department of Defense-wide source code and artifact sharing at the request of the Air Force Chief Experience Officer. Authored changes to Kessel Run’s Secure Classification Guide to facilitate sharing between organizations.
• Engaged with 40+ independent product teams across multiple portfolios and product lines to ensure organization-wide and individual team needs are tracked, prioritized, and executed.
• Spoke as a Subject Matter Expert on the topic of design system philosophy and scalability at Department of the Air Force design conferences and community of interest events.
Documentation Portfolio Lead, Kessel Run (USAF)
September 2022 - March 2023
Portfolio-level leader that planned, documented, and executed a reorganization of the All Domain Common Platform (ADCP) documentation team to better align to platform changes being made. Redefined the role of documentation in the buildout of the platform.
• Delivered briefings to senior leadership over a reorganization of documentation to fit a project-based focus instead of a product-based focus that ensured all aspects of the platform would be properly documented.
• Ensured the documentation team was a contributing member of the platform from “Day Zero”, by documenting the scope, objectives, and timeline of platform projects prior to their kickoff, then documenting setbacks, learnings, and achievements once a project was completed.
• Trained documentation team on how to perform user interviews and better integrate with the platform teams in order to more seamlessly add documentation to the process of completing work.
Lead Designer and Product Manager, Kessel Run (USAF)
September 2019 - September 2020
Product-level design leader responsible for the creation and rollout of the Maintenance portfolio’s design system. Dual-hatted as both designer and product manager on the effort to align 10 products around a consistent user experience. Success of this effort lead to expansion of the design system to org-wide.
• Facilitated discussions on goals, anti-goals, and principles for designers and enabled Maintenance designers to make better design decisions, faster.
• Developed accessible color palettes for light and dark mode, leveraged Material-UI to create DoD-specific elements and components.
• Identified priority components for expansion of the system through facilitated workshops with product teams.
• Created and shared wireframe versions of components, coached designers on how to implement these components in ways that would speed up development cycles.
• Implemented a developer engagement program to onboard Maintenance portfolio developers to the design system through six week direct engagements with the design system team.
Product Designer, Kessel Run (USAF) via Mainsail Group, Inc
November 2018 - September 2019
Product designer responsible for Discovery and Framing on the newly founded Wing Ops branch at Kessel Run. This effort identified 10 products that would become the “aircraft maintenance suite”. Designed the aircraft status product within the Maintenance suite.
• Spent 8 months at Pivotal Labs (now VMware Tanzu Labs) in agile software development and design best practices.
• Conducted weekly user interviews and routine testing to rapidly iterate on a product that launched its minimum viable product (MVP) 75 days after inception.
• Created design artifacts including user journey maps, empathy maps, and personas to facilitate better product decisions.