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Staff Product Designer,
The New York Times
2019 – 2021
Staff Product Designer, Feb 2021 – Sep 2021
Product Design Director, Mar 2020 – Feb 2021
Product Design Lead, Feb 2019 – Mar 2020
I was brought on as the first design leader of Publishing, a group of 5 teams that make the publishing tools for our newsroom of 1,600 journalists. Among other responsibilities, I led workflow and tools design for a cross-company initiative to rethink how we create the homepage of the Times, introducing dynamic, multivariate testing at the pace of news.
In 2021, I transitioned to an individual contributor role, which allowed me to lead tooling for the homepage initiative full-time, as a Staff Product Designer.
For two years prior, I served as a people manager as well, hiring, coaching, and managing a team of 5 designers and gaining investment to scale the team to 9. I also founded and gained investment for the company's first design system for internal tools, now known as Ink.
More broadly, I contributed to design leadership at The Times, serving in our mentorship program and DEI squad, and organizing talks in the design community.
I make tools for complex needs
By day, I use my background in journalism to bring curiosity and clarity to people's real-world problems. By night, I apply design thinking to my side projects in food writing and education.
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Senior Product Designer, Wirecutter
2017 – 2019
I was hired by The New York Times to be Wirecutter's first product designer, following its acquisition in 2016. I built the design team from the ground up, hiring and managing 4 designers, and leading us through a major redesign in 2017. You can still see the core experience of that work on Wirecutter.com today.
Day to day, I provided leadership, strategy, and hands-on design, collaborated with product, tech, and editorial to define and execute on our vision for the company. I gathered requirements, conducted research, and contributed designs as an IC.
In addition, I introduced Wirecutter to user research, co-managed our A/B testing program, and — on one memorable day — sniffed dozens of bacon grease-soaked rags in the name of finding the best laundry detergent.
Director of User Experience, Blenderbox
2011 – 2017
UX Designer, Oct 2011 – Oct 2013
I managed UX resources for a $3M pipeline, and hired and established a 4-person UX team. In my proudest accomplishment, I introduced product strategy as a new capability to the agency, which led to major engagements — when I left in 2017, it accounted for more than 30% of annual revenue.
I transformed the agency's practices, introducing elements of Agile into client workflows, and organizing “Front-End Day,” a company-wide day of discussions and workshops to improve designer-engineer collaboration and visual polish. I established our practices for usability testing, and I created a style guide for our wireframes and open-sourced it.
Looking back, I'm grateful for the opportunities I had to build solve complex problems for our clients, which included venerable nonprofits, educational institutions, and the government of the City of New York.
Selected clients
NYC Department of Education
Boston Logan Airport
Yale Law School
End-to-end student management