I Don't Just Hit the Ground Running. I Run Metaphorical Marathons.

I'm a senior product designer with six years in the field. For four of them I worked on a ground-up rebuild of an enterprise talent platform, where I owned about half of the new app's features and worked every week with PMs, engineers, and executives.

How I work now: prototypes are my main way of communicating design. I build a clickable prototype on a copy of the real app, so PMs and engineers see how a feature actually behaves, and I add walkthroughs that call out what changed from the original data. Figma is the support layer, for specific UI that needs careful arrangement and quick documentation, and some days it's still the faster tool. I guide AI closely from the first prompt. I ask for several options instead of one, then push back on each: does it match how our other features behave, reuse our front-end components and tokens, and solve the user's real flow in a way that fits the business case? I keep adjusting my AI process and its outputs to what dev and QA need, so what I hand off is something they can build and test. Usage data and business cases shape what's worth designing at all. For almost two years I've also done AI training and evaluation work as a contractor, which sharpens how I prompt and check.

Before design, I was a qualitative project director at a global market research company, Radius, managing $2 million in projects for household B2C and B2B brands and working directly with executives. I was part of more than 2,000 hours of web-based qualitative research, mostly one-on-one interviews, and I brought that into how I trained product teams to run discovery over the last couple of years. That means I've written bids, managed budgets, and walked into rooms where the question was, "So what do we do about this?" It still shapes how I design.

Before that, I taught for 13 years, earned two master's degrees in education, led a department of five teachers, and presented at conferences. Teaching is why I'm good at workshops, why I explain design decisions so people actually follow them, and why I did not do a bootcamp. They couldn't go deep enough, so I found mentors and built my own education instead.

Outside of work: my husband and teenage sons, ice skating, yoga, poetry, painting abstract watercolors, and speaking several languages. I like to dive deep into everything. Mostly, though, I'm someone who spots patterns and likes finding the deceptively simple fix.