Resume

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).