As the Design Lead for Security Performance Management (SPM), I spearheaded end-to-end UX strategy and execution for a data-intensive cybersecurity product, significantly contributing to its growth and adoption. As a key senior member of a small, high-performance team, I played a pivotal role in improving our processes and growing our organizational influence.

Responsibilities:

- Led strategic UX planning and prioritization within cross-functional teams, including product, engineering, data science, and sales, to shape and define product roadmaps

- Drove the entire design lifecycle, from research and problem-space exploration, to concepts, testing, and execution, including documenting design specifications, facilitating critical product decisions with product and engineering leaders, and providing support throughout feature implementation for more than 90 unique features

- Advocated  for users by designing and leading comprehensive user research efforts, communicating research results and insights, and facilitating cross-functional, solutions-oriented workshops to leverage organizational knowledge and improve alignment

- Contributed significantly to the visual and interactive consistency across product lines by helping to create, evolve, and maintain company-wide design system

- Aligned design decisions and dependencies across multiple product lines to ensure a cohesive experience across a suite of enterprise solutions 

- Mentored and coached 4 junior and mid-level UX designers, fostering their professional growth, and contributing to the maturity and skill development of the UX team

Achievements:

- Successfully led end-to-end design for the launch of a standalone Security Performance Management product, leading to a 50% increase in user adoption, category-leading product maturity according to Gartner, and 30% efficiency increase in product development processes

- Redesigned and optimized SPM's information architecture, leading to 24% improvement in task completion rates and 41% increase in feature utilization

- Championed continuous discovery processes within the UX team, improving our organizational influence, and directly impacting product direction to better center user needs leading to a 20% increase in SUS score

- Conceived and implemented a program of cross-functional innovation workshops, allowing us to leverage organizational knowledge to bear on large problems, and fostering a solutions-focused and collaborative culture

- Spearheaded the strategic adoption of Figma as a central tool for design and collaboration. Figma became widely adopted across the organization, leading to enhanced cross-functional collaboration, streamlined design and development workflows, and reduced tooling costs.

- Served as senior designer across a product portfolio consisting of highly-individualized higher-education application and supporting products

- Successfully advocated for and led the end-to-end design of the App Builder, a self-configuration product, which allowed us to reduce our onboarding costs by 300%, streamline user and business processes, and expand our potential market to include small and medium organizations

Introduced weekly user testing to our design and product processes, increasing our influence and fostering a user-centered culture within cross-functional product teams, leading to user-centered design decisions, and better collaboration with product and engineering

- Led collaborative workshops to understand unique customer needs, leading to more effective product prioritization and design decisions as we attempted to balance demands from customers with highly individualized needs, as well as increasing customer satisfaction by 40% based on post-launch surveys

- Mentored the three junior designers, increasing the overall maturity of the design team

- Served as the lead designer on OpenShift and Unified Storage Manager consecutively, leading both products from concept to execution. 

- Pioneered new interaction concepts for these novel products by collaborating extensively with SMEs, engineering, and lighthouse customers

- Helped to create and implement a new company-wide style guide and pattern library

- Advocated for increased UX influence across the company, including helping to plan and execute UX activities at customer events

- Cultivated a successful freelance design and development practice, delivering end-to-end solutions for diverse clients and honing skills in full stack development, graphic design, and foundational UX/UI principles.