Hello and thanks for your interest. I'm a former teacher, technologist, and digital product manager turned service designer, strategist, & researcher. In design I found a process, toolset, and mindset that makes sense in a way to which nothing else even comes close. Design is more than a profession, it’s a way of life and learning it has made me a better person. I love the act of solving problems using human centered design and more than anything I love helping others learn to use human centered design to improve the lives of others.
To learn more, please keep scrolling, download my resume and/or check-out my portfolio.
Service & experience designer, innovation coach, design strategist, & researcher with a passion for delighting customers and empowering others to use human centered design for solving customer problems & fulfilling unmet needs. Extensive experience using rapid experimentation to test new ideas and develop scalable business models as well as in teaching others to run hypothesis driven experiments using principles rooted in the scientific method. Experience leading and sustaining highly engaged cross-functional teams and in managing organizational change efforts. A catalyst for innovation with 20+ years experience designing holistic, human-centered, omni-channel products & services.
Service design
Business design
Design strategy
Experience design
Design research, synthesis, & analysis
Human centered design
Org design
Innovation coaching
Rapid experimentation
Storytelling
Group workshop facilitation
Influencing & managing cross-functional teams
Digital product management
Organizational change management
Agile workflow implementation & management
Managing & collaborating with distributed teams
October, 2021 - Current
Establish with a co-lead the service design offering within the Chief Design Office and USAA Bank. Primary activities include strategizing with designers on existing projects, educating designers & directors on service design methodology, tools, & strategy, and partnering with business partners on strategic bank initiatives.
PROJECTS
• Project Objective
Design a long term, futuristic vision for the future of USAA bank and design & develop a storytelling experience to make this vision of the future tangible, emotionally engaging, & inspiring to business partners and bank leadership.
• Project Outcomes
Currently in-process
• My Role
Strategizing with business, design, & technology partners & leading the cross-functional efforts to create a 10 & 5-year vision for the future of bank. Projected mini-milestones include: discovery research synthesis & several large, cross-functional design workshops that will lead to the creation of a vision for the future of bank. The vision will be depicted in a multi-media story that will be shared with employees and partners to make the future seem tangible and attainable. This story and the engagement it drives will be the backbone for continued digital transformation.
September, 2017 - September, 2021
January, 2020 - September, 2021
Specialty: Service Design, Business Design
Use design process and mindset to find holistic solutions to ambiguous and complex, cross-enterprise problems. Collaborate with partners and stakeholders to co-create customer-driven solutions that are as simple as they are effective. Supported the enterprise auto lines of business and the independent agent sales channel.
PROJECTS
• Project Objective
Discover opportunities for improvement to the Know Your Drive telematics experience outside of the app for agents, policy holders, and customer service reps
• Project Outcomes
Identified top 2 root causes impacting the end-to-end experience for agents, customers, and service reps.
• My Role
Conducted quantitative & qualitative research; performed content inventory and analysis.
• Project Objective
Design strategy & process for moving concepts from idea stage to scaling multiple markets
• Project Outcomes
Created a vision for a potential pipeline and am currently working with leadership to develop a roll-out strategy
• My Role
Combined concepts from Lean Start-up, design thinking, agile, and Strategyzer (creators of the Business Model Canvas) with learnings from qualitative research to create an Auto COE specific innovation process
• Project Objective
Develop a body of knowledge & internal expertise about independent agency norms and needs on a national scale.
• Project Outcomes
Channel insights and design principles that are exclusive to the American Family Insurance Enterprise. This work represents a competitive advantage at a time of accelerated change.
• My Role
Conducted qualitative research & collaborated with research team to identify insights & opportunities, design principles.
• Project Objectives
1) Align stakeholders & leaders on top problems within the current agent experience.
2) Engage stakeholders in new way of working, to increase awareness of and confidence in a new iterative approach to product development.
3) Complete the first two requests within 4 weeks of initial request.
• Project Outcomes
A 5-day remote, design- sprint based in part on the original Google Design Sprint that took participants from shared understanding of current state, to co-creation of a vision for future state, to identification of top agent problems, and finished with designing prototypes and gathering agent feedback. Our participant NPS score, was 71, or “world class” (according to Bain, the creator of the NPS index measurement.)
• My Role
Lead point of contact for all partner communication. Designed agenda & facilitated sessions. Created Mural boards, designed & delivered a Design Thinking primer for participants, created summary/ recommended next steps for business partners.
• Project Objective
Understand, map and record "one source of truth" of current state service processes to inform key decisions made by digital product & customer service teams.
• Project Outcomes
Identified common processes, created service blueprints and journey maps, determined patterns, and created recommendations for a new 3-5 year growth strategy.
• My Role
Led research team, conducted analysis, created 3-5 year strategy report.
September, 2017 - December, 2019
Coached 3 unique cross-functional, dedicated teams participating in 90-day corporate sponsored, innovation accelerators to use a hybrid approach that combined principles from Design Thinking, Agile, & Lean Start-up to search for & create delightful, emotionally engaging solutions to customer problems. Objective of the accelerator was to drive business outcomes while influencing participants through practice and safe experimentation to adopt repeatable, continuous innovation-discovery behaviors. Additional responsibilities involved evangelizing new innovation methodologies through workshop facilitation, bootcamp facilitation, leadership coaching, and coordinating Innovation Fairs.
Team’s Projects
• Project Objective
Identify, in the eyes of the customer, the most important communication preference options and increase adoption of paperless communication.
• Project Outcomes
Team identified a primary technical blocker preventing the company from realizing a multi-million dollar potential savings from customer enrollment in paperless communication.
Team presented evidence of the blockers to senior leadership resulting in emergency budget & resource prioritization approval that led to creating a seamless, online user experience that paved the way for paperless adoption.
• My Role
Coached the team to narrow their focus to the problem with the greatest opportunity: paperless communication adoption. Cleared roadblocks such as limited access to data, limited access to customer services reps & recordings, team communication & interpersonal conflicts. Established daily, weekly, & monthly rituals for the team to develop their own self regulating behaviors and encouraged commitment to team, customer, & progress as opposed to commitment to manager & self promotion.
• Project Objective
Create a simplified process to support more effective development conversations between managers and employees and develop more accurate enterprise talent identification & mobility processes.
• Project Outcomes
Team validated a customer and problem within weeks, validated a solution for a single internal market within a month and then scaled to multiple internal “markets” based on world-of-mouth marketing. The solution was approved by senior leadership and rolled out iteratively across the enterprise.
• My Role
Influenced the team to focus on identifying the problem and finding a solution that was technology agnostic. Helped team understand the early adopter theory as well as how to predict and measure the results of behavior based experimentation and then how to use the data collected in experiments to influence leadership decisions.
• Project Objective
Once the technical issues identified in the original Paperless Communication project were resolved a new team was formed and tasked with identifying tactics that led to greater paperless adoption.
• Project Outcomes
Team learned that iterative experimentation was not possible in the existing digital and analog systems. Team created a high fidelity prototype app that was designed specifically for the purpose of connecting teams that wanted to learn with existing early adopter customers.
• My Role
Influenced the team to focus on the problem preventing them from solving the originally identified goal of increasing paperless adoption. Helped clear roadblock and communication issues. Acted as a liaison between the team & the enterprise digital & agile transformation efforts as well as IT & innovation leadership.
(now called Keap)
September, 2015 - September, 2016
University of Minnesota - Information Management Systems, Post-Graduate Certification
University of Wisconsin-Madison - B.S. Education
Summary:
Intuit trained Innovation Catalyst & design thinking facilitator
Scrum Project Management, ICAgile Professional Certification, 89-1835-e6b66094-ebf9-4ae2-8bc7-403630027af8
Service Design Immersive, Cooper, Credential: 13822987
Institute for the Future, Practitioner Certification; expected September, 2022
Highly proficient in most prototyping, user research, content management, & enterprise collaboration tools including:
Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop/Illustrator/XD/Acrobat)
Sharepoint 2010/2013
Confluence
Balsamiq
UserZoom.com
Sketch
Details
Professional Certifications
Scrum Project Management, ICAgile Professional Certification
Innovation Catalyst/Design Thinking Facilitation, Intuit Certified, Level 3
Service Design Immersive, Cooper
Prototyping
Balsamiq
Adobe Creative Cloud/Suite (Photoshop/ Illustrator/XD)
CSS/HTML
Sketch
InVision
Usability Research
UserZoom
Zoom
Remote Design Facilitation
Trello
Mural
Miro
Slack
Analytics
Adobe Analytics (SiteCatalyst)
Google Analytics
Foundational
MS Office Suite
Office 365
Google apps
Content Management & Publishing Platforms
Sharepoint 2010, 2013
Wordpress
Squarespace
Shopify
Content & E-learning Development
Captivate
Camtasia
SnagIt
Jing
Web Marketing
Infusionsoft
Unbounce
Survey Monkey
Mailchimp
Woofoo
Enterprise Collaboration
Slack
MS Office 365/ Sharepoint
Yammer
Wiki
Confluence
Child & Family Resources, Member, Board of Directors, 2012-2016 (view coaching the staff slide show)
Creative Startups, Guest Faculty
Google Start-up Weekend: Tucson, Winner of 2013 Lean Start-up competition (view Start-up Weekend slide show)
Start-up Tucson, Volunteer, 2013- present
Global Service Design Network, Member since 2017
Home renovation, animal adoption promotion, landscaping