About

I’m a design leader, systems thinker, and organizational strategist with over 16 years of experience helping teams navigate complexity, align around what matters, and deliver meaningful outcomes through thoughtful design and operations.

My career has taken me across sectors—tech, fintech, government, and enterprise SaaS—where I’ve consistently been hired into first-of-their-kind roles to build teams, define strategy, and bring cohesion to messy, high-stakes environments. Whether leading platform transformation at Atlassian, founding a service design practice at Fannie Mae, or embedding service design into enterprise delivery and customer support at Shopify, I’ve helped organizations make better sense of their systems—and evolve with care, clarity, and purpose.

I specialize in bridging design, operations, and culture. I’m often brought in when teams are scaling quickly, transitioning ownership, struggling to prioritize, or seeking to mature their approach to experience delivery. My strength lies in surfacing patterns, mapping ambiguity, and translating systemic friction into grounded, actionable strategy. I do this through a combination of service design, organizational development, and deep cross-functional partnership.

Over the years, I’ve built and led multidisciplinary teams, designed operating models, authored internal strategy and engagement frameworks, and coached leaders at all levels—from early-career ICs to senior executives. I’ve contributed to platform maturity strategies, guided reorgs, defined capability readiness approaches, and helped teams bring both new features and new ways of working to life.

Here’s a snapshot of the kind of impact I’ve had:

At Atlassian, my work spanned three distinct chapters:

• Platform Design: I joined Atlassian as an individual contributor and triad design partner, where I led service experience research and strategy for our platform adoption team during a pivotal stage of platform maturity. Early on, I focused on designing high-touch, developer-to-developer enablement models—mapping service experiences and identifying friction points. As Atlassian increased its investment and scaled platform adoption efforts, I helped drive the transition from high-touch to low-touch to self-serve adoption. I led and synthesized research, co-designed engagement models, adoption scoring frameworks, and success metrics, and contributed to product strategy for internal tooling. As the team grew, I transitioned into management and broader design leadership—hiring and mentoring product and content designers to expand our toolset and systematize our approach to platform capability delivery, especially as we set our sights to expanding from 1P to 2P.

• Growth Design: I oversaw the launch of Atlassian’s first generative AI experience in the editor, later scaled across Jira, Confluence, and Trello. As Design Manager for the Confluence onboarding team, I led dozens of growth experiments and improved experiment velocity 3.5x by introducing a cross-functional co-design workflow and restructuring our Jira board. This initiative reduced friction, clarified delivery timelines, improved team health, and elevated reporting to executives.

• Product Design: I currently lead initiatives across Confluence mobile, navigation, and notification strategy—including Slack and email re-engagement experiences—and support new product efforts like multiplayer collaboration and Company Hub (our intranet builder). I’ve also begun supporting our local design system team and have leveraged speculative design research to explore mobile-specific use cases for generative AI, including voice-driven content creation. Across all teams, I actively contribute to product and company-level design quality reviews.

At Shopify, I was the first service design hire, brought in to introduce and establish service design as a capability across enterprise and support teams. I led internal education initiatives and maturity assessments, facilitated numerous workshops, and hosted conference sessions to help teams understand and apply service design thinking in real business contexts. I also organized a high-profile panel on service design with top Canadian industry professionals, sparking internal conversation and interest across disciplines. I took a highly scrappy and coaching-forward approach—working hands-on with cross-functional partners, building trust, and demonstrating the practical value of service design through small wins and visible impact. Eventually scaling to a team of three under my leadership, we helped shape foundational conversations around service quality, experience delivery, and internal capability building.

At Fannie Mae, I was hired as the first design leader to build a service design practice from scratch. Over 18 months, I hired a multidisciplinary team of 12—including researchers, content strategists, service designers, and data scientists. I helped secure major consulting partnerships (McKinsey, EY, Sapient, BCG) and led customer research with partners like Wells Fargo and Rocket Mortgage. Our service mapping and systems synthesis led to deeper understanding of the mortgage servicing journey, internal information flows, and experience gaps across the ecosystem. We created executive immersion experiences to help stakeholders grasp the value of design-led transformation, resulting in multimillion-dollar investment in affordable housing initiatives.

At Capital One, my time there was foundational to my growth as a designer and systems thinker. I co-created the Design Development Program (DDP), a two-year rotational initiative for new graduate designers, built to attract and nurture early career talent while scaling Capital One’s in-house design practice. I led the end-to-end development of the hiring journey—including drafting job descriptions, mapping the service blueprint for the candidate and onboarding experience, designing interview processes, and collaborating closely with recruiting and HR partners. I also developed onboarding and mentorship plans, established success metrics, and served as a public ambassador for the program—speaking at conferences, hosting events, and actively recruiting at top design schools across North America. The DDP has since become a long-standing and well-regarded entry point for new design talent within Capital One. This initiative deepened my expertise in design operations and people systems while giving me exposure to high-impact program development.

Capital One’s acquisition of Adaptive Path brought some of the industry’s most respected design thinkers into our orbit. Working alongside these mentors, I was exposed to advanced approaches in service design, user research, design operations, and content strategy that significantly influenced my practice. I applied these learnings in a number of settings—including a financial coaching pilot with Adaptive Path, where I designed evaluation methods using the CFPB Financial Well-Being Scale and Cantril Ladder as part of my doctoral research on human flourishing.

I also contributed to foundational research and immersive customer studies that informed Capital One’s move into the high-net-worth segment—eventually shaping the Savor credit card—and supported the design of a shared finances mobile app with a focus on the first-time user experience. My time at Capital One helped me internalize the value of rigorous research, cross-functional co-creation, and long-term thinking in organizational design.

Across every role, I’ve worked to bring intentionality to the way we structure teams, build services, and scale collaboration. I care deeply about equity, inclusion, and psychological safety—and design my leadership approach reflects that. I’m often the one pulling people out of the weeds to ask bigger questions. I offer structure without rigidity, direction without ego, and feedback rooted in growth and care.

I’m currently open to:

• Full-time roles in design leadership, design operations, organizational design, or people strategy

• Consulting engagements focused on service transformation, organizational effectiveness, or experience maturity

• Contract or fractional roles that support organization transitions, platform enablement, execution velocity, or operational clarity

If your team is at a crossroads—or in need of a trusted thought partner to bring clarity, cohesion, and momentum—I’d love to talk.

You can reach me via email or connect with me on LinkedIn.

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