Experience
Advocacy Team Lead (Sr. Design Advocate)
4/2022—present
zeroheight, remote from Oakland, California
- Collaborate with the Head of Marketing on quarterly content strategies to generate leads, drive demand, and support meaningful client engagements, contributing to sustainable business growth.
- Identify opportunities for the advocacy team to work with cross-functional teams and external parties.
- Manage designer and developer advocates and support their career growth.
- Develop and maintain 75+ resources for the design system community, including worksheets, guides, and e-books.
- Lead How We Document, an annual report on design systems in the community from survey design to synthesis of 300+ responses, report creation, and promotion (reaching 50K+ people).
- Deliver talks at conferences worldwide on design systems and DesignOps, having presented at 12+ events including DesignOps Summit, Design Matters, and Beyond Tellerrand.
- Organize and curate in-person meetups and conferences, including Converge US/UK (175-300 people).
- Co-host the Design Systems WTF and Design Systems: Beyond the Button podcasts with 2400 live subscribers and 1000+ monthly downloads.
- Advise dozens of enterprise design teams on complex design systems and design ops challenges.
- Featured in Design That Scales by Dan Mall, providing key insights on DesignOps.
Principal DesignOps Manager, Product Design
5/2021–4/2022
Citrix, Santa Clara, California
- Established and managed the DesignOps practice, overseeing holistic programs for a 60-person product design organization as a team of one.
- Fostered and maintained operational scalability, connection, culture, and cross-functional relationships, especially during the pandemic.
- Led the efforts of our company-wide design system, which included managing a 16-person federated team, creating governance for 30+ products and endpoints, and establishing a strategy to level up the design system, which the CPTO praised.
- Created sustainable DesignOps processes and 24+ companion playbooks and roadshows for hiring, onboarding, tooling evaluation and transitions, story pointing, working with design, and career growth.
- Introduced localization and accessibility into the design process by creating a course and training mentors.
Manager II, Product Design / DesignOps
10/2018 – 5/2021
Citrix, Santa Clara, California
- Led the creation of the end-user design system, including establishing a cross-functional governance process and managing an 8-person federated team.
- Facilitated maintenance, contributed guidelines, and defined accessibility solutions for the design system.
- Oversaw 5 designers, hired 7 designers and 2 managers; recognized for identifying top-notch candidates.
- Managed projects on Citrix Workspace, enhancing the design team’s participation in the SAFe framework.
- Manager II, Product Design / DesignOps (continued)
- Secured a strategic seat at the table for design, driving design-led experiences and building trusted cross-functional relationships.
- Encouraged designers to innovate with new tools and methods while keeping work realistic and iterative.
- Invented and patented “Flowchart-style diagramming tool to build automated workflows” to significantly simplify creating automation. (Patent no. US11709591B2, awarded 2022).
Principal Product Designer
10/2017–10/2018
Lead Product Designer
8/2014–10/2017
Citrix, Raleigh, North Carolina
- Led high-profile product and feature innovations for ShareFile; serving 80K customers and 20M users.
- Entrusted to conduct multiple due diligence evaluations for company acquisitions.
- Served as the accessibility expert, conducting audits and partnering with engineers on accessible solutions.
- Selected by managers to create video pitches, present concepts, and lead demos at company-wide and executive meetings.
- Negotiated feature requirements to ensure optimal UX that could easily scale from MVP to enterprise use.
- Translated technical and enterprise requirements into simple, user-friendly designs for mobile apps, integrations, enterprise features, design systems, and product innovations.
- Led UX activities, including workshops, ideation, sketching, critiquing, and wireframing.
- Won first place at the 2018 Raleigh Tech Fair for creating Citrix Workspace Push Notifications.
- The team won the “Best Effective In-House Design Team” 2014 Design for Experience Award.
Senior User Experience Strategist
11/2012–8/2014
Rock Creek Strategic Marketing (now U.Group), Chevy Chase, Maryland
- Led, mentored, and collaborated with colleagues on UX strategies, design solutions, and conference talks.
- Guided clients, who were unfamiliar with UX, on methods, activities, and deliverables.
- Identified and implemented relevant UX activities throughout a project’s lifecycle.
- Successfully scoped UX work for multi-million dollar bid proposals.
- Identified pain points and improved in-house practices, including a QA testing plan for responsive sites.
- Clients included the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Education Pioneers, EBSA, Export-Import Bank, and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.
Skills
Leadership + Management
- Strategy development
- Stakeholder negotiation
- Navigating difficult conversations
- Hiring and retention
- Mentoring and career development
- Fostering team culture
Content and Marketing
- Presenting
- Hosting in-person/virtual events
- Writing: blogging, technical writing, copyediting
- SEO optimization
- Creating promotional campaigns
- Creating extensible content
DesignOps
- Design operations at enterprise scale
- Change management
- Systems thinking
- Organizational agility
- Process (creation, documentation, iteration)
- Workflow automation
- Building community
UX Specialties
- Design systems
- Interaction design
- Inclusive design: accessibility, localization, globalization
- Information architecture
- Diagramming
- Storytelling
- Workshop facilitation
- User research and usability testing
- UX due diligence for acquisitions
- Quality assurance testing
- Agile/SAFe frameworks
Software (highlights)
- Project management: Jira, Trello, Asana
- Marketing: Hubspot, Semrush, Google Analytics
- Design: Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud
- Whiteboarding: FigJam, Miro
- Documentation: Confluence, Notion, zeroheight
- Accessibility: Assistive technology in default operating systems; JAWS
- Automation and AI: Airtable, Zapier, ChatGPT
Education
Master of Science Degree in Interaction Design and Information Architecture
University of Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland, December 2011.
Thesis Project/Paper: Mobile Technology for Non-profits: Harnessing the Power of Crowdsourcing.
Bachelor of Science Degree in Natural Resources Management, Environmental Ed. focus
University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, May 1999.
Selected speaking engagements
- UX in Real Life, a podcast with M.F. Goings, October 2021–present.
- “Information Architects: The Missing Link in Design Systems” IA Conference, Seattle, 2024.
- “Decolonizing Your Design System: Unveiling Biases and Revolutionizing Inclusion” Design Matters Copenhagen; UX Y’all, Raleigh, N.C.; Clarity, San Francisco; all in 2023.
- “Facilitating Inclusive Workshops in a Hybrid World” with M.F. Goings, IA Conference, New Orleans, 2023.
- “Inviting People In” Beyond Tellerrand (Berlin, 2022), THAT Conference, Wisconsin, 2023.
- “The DesignOps Starter Kit” DesignOps Summit (2021), Into Design Systems, virtual, 2022.
- “Unifying Your Product Design Org through DesignOps” UX Y’all, virtual, 2021.
Community involvement
- Co-chair, The Information Architecture Conference 2025 (2024–present).
- Track leader for Design Systems, Ambition Empower (2022–present).
- Guest instructor for design systems and accessibility, BRIDGEGOOD, Oakland, Calif. (2023–present).
- Chair, DEI Committee at zeroheight (2022–2024).
- UC Climate Steward (2024–present); UC Master Gardener (2022–present).
- Founder and organizer, Hella Design Systems, Bay Area (2022–present).
- Co-chair, Citrix Asian Professionals (employee resource group, 2021–2022).