Leading through a change in plan.

Our goal was to bring three acquired products into a unified desktop application and SaaS offering. When Outerbounds joined the picture, the leadership team regrouped. I brought back a unified product vision I’d pitched in my first year and adapted those ideas to the new reality.

Make sense of the whole experience.

The acquired product ran on a different technology stack, and we had to adopt its platform. That meant rethinking the information architecture, terminology, and how people found and used their work. I led research, journey mapping, and gap analysis to identify overlaps and differences between the experiences.

With product management, leadership, and engineering, we shaped a phased convergence plan. Design worked through how new and existing features would appear across the offerings, including when to introduce paid capabilities in the free desktop experience. The user’s journey needed to guide those decisions.

Build a foundation people could use.

Phase 1 / A shared system, adopted

Over about a year (2025), I led the move to a single shared design system, now in use across every Anaconda product that existed before the acquisitions. Designers worked directly through Claude and GitHub integrations, and engineering received development-ready designs one to two weeks sooner.

Phase 2 / Rebuilding for convergence

When the acquisitions changed the plan, two design systems and different backends added friction. I pitched a move from Kendo to shadcn/ui, a more agentic approach with a shared component library, built to work with the AI-assisted workflow we already had. That rebuild was underway when I left.

Researchers used AI-assisted analysis to get preliminary results to the team within 2 days of testing wrapping, down from about 1.5 weeks.

Make insight easier to reach.

I also designed and shipped Pulse, an internal tool that turned our research-backed personas and archetypes into agents connected to the research database. Product managers could explore a brief, surface gaps, and ask questions. Designers could use it to flag potential interaction issues before stakeholder review.

The agents were grounded exclusively in our own qualitative and quantitative research, with new findings updating that grounding as they entered the database. We set tight boundaries around what the agents could answer, keeping responses within the available evidence.

We reviewed data logs and ran internal evaluations every month to check accuracy and adherence to those boundaries. Agent responses helped us decide what to investigate; they did not establish how real users would behave. Interviews, surveys, and usability testing continued alongside the tool.

Bring design thinking beyond the product.

As the design leader on the ELT, I was often pulled into decisions beyond UX: brand direction, website experiences, marketing materials, lifecycle email, and product-led growth. I partnered with teams across the company, offering guidance and helping connect those touchpoints into a more coherent experience.

Help a strong designer become a strong manager.

I saw natural leadership ability in an experienced principal designer and coached her into her first management role, overseeing the research team. We worked on the shift from doing the work to supporting the people doing it. She earned strong feedback from her team, and we gained another layer of leadership within the department.

Across my tenure, five people moved into expanded roles, and no one on the team left voluntarily. I’m proud of the growth opportunities and sense of belonging we created together.

Keep the team aligned while things change.

I established regular stakeholder updates and a change-management cadence that kept progress, decisions, and emerging issues visible. People knew what had changed and what to do next.