Design leadership
I have experience building human centered design processes, methods, and deliverables at startups, agencies, and large corporations. Below are some key artifacts demonstrating how I’ve driven growth across design teams. Building trust and developing continuous, honest feedback through collaboration are core practices I bring to any team I am managing or contributing to.
[ex. 1] Product Design ‘Agile’ Integration
I presented ideas and facilitated brainstorms with cross-department leaders frequently at Magnopus. In order to drive better results and speed of delivery I proposed this map depicting how design can integrate with PM and Eng teams, proposed by Scott Jesser to team leads at Magnopus (spring 2023) This effort helped gain feedback from other leads and led to a much more codified and efficient feature development process.
The success of this process was achieved through shared understanding and artifacts. Every feature milestone has all product teams present, and each has a tangible design deliverable as an outcome. It allows for design oversight at the feature milestone level for director level leaders, and at the design phase milestone for manager review and team collaboration.
Another key success to shifting our process this way was to plan for design consulting time. This process isn’t “True Agile” development, but it’s a cyclical waterfall with ownership and collaboration being built in throughout the phases. When features were scoped well and each of the milestones were hit, this process worked incredibly well.
Weekly check ins between leads in Design, Product, Engineering and QA allowed for quick synchronous approvals and feedback. Daily checkins on Slack for designers while also attending engineering standups provided the ownership needed to work quickly while maintaining quality. Both of these weekly and daily checkin formats led to a greater shared vision and understanding of design’s role and expectations throughout the feature development.
We delivered several landmark features across all breakpoints for web, our mobile app, and even wireframes for the Unreal Editor extension each within about a 3-5 week timespan (depending on the complexity) from the Discovery Meeting to the first test of a feature on the Development environment.
[ex. 2] Product Design Approach & Deliverables
A knowledge share presentation given by Scott Jesser to the Design Team at Disney Parks, Products & Interactive (spring 2019) helping engineering teams to understand and provide feedback on UX/UI design at Disney.