I’m an Austin-based design manager & creative director with a knack for practice development, mentorship, and design leadership. I take great pride in my teams and the UX solutions they help craft for users.
After starting my career in agency work in the early 2000s, I’ve worked for a variety of product companies and agencies: from a tiny Chinese-centric startup to Global 500 companies. I’ve been heavily focused in client services as well as product teams, working with a wide variety of users in a wide variety of markets. More recently, I’ve been working in the healthcare space – growing and building a team of designers for a bioinformatics startup.
I also make my own furniture, watch old Kung-Fu movies in my spare time, and I’m a decent cook; so I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.
Working as a team leader and design manager, I act as an integral part of a project group and a design team advocate. I am well versed in teaching clients and stakeholders as well as advising cross-functional teams on best practices and key research findings and my teams’ methods. My strengths really shine in strategic work – aligning business goals to user needs to deliver results through my teams that are on time, on budget, and on target.
Over my career, I’ve been a firm believer in helping to build a strong local community and, as such, I am a core member of both Refresh Austin (a multidisciplinary meetup for professionals who work on the web in broad capacity) and the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA).
I’m often working on new talks and presentations in my spare time and love sharing new findings, research methods, and designs with others. I am a tireless advocate for practice development at any workplace, as I believe that cross-pollination of ideas inevitably leads to better, more well-rounded products and services and encourages the passionately curious to create.
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