Head of Design @ Crafted; Denver (2022-2025)
- Designed MVP for a startup that secured $10M funding round.
- Co-designed a product that achieved over $10M in sales within its first year.
- Conducted contextual field research, user interviews, and usability testing.
- Established DesignOps processes to improve engineering, design and product team collaboration.
- Mentored in-house and client teams; taught month-long product design class for partners.
- Impact: Delivered concept to launch in 4 months, while enabling teams to sustain and build design practice.
Staff Design Strategist (and consultant) @ BlueSuit; Denver, CO (2020-2023)
- Led research on user trust in AI-driven legal document review
- Designed confidence scores & side-by-side verification patterns, reducing review time 65%.
- Built & maintained central research repository
- Partnered and collaborated with as team of PMs, engineers, data scientists, and executives to align product direction.
Design Team Lead @ Teach for America, New York City, NY (2013-2018)
- Built and managed the in-house design team; introduced lean UX practices org-wide.
- Partnered with cross-functional leaders to align design with compliance and reporting goals.
- Led design of mobile-first compliance app, improving application completion +25% overall, +100% on mobile.
- Mentored and developed junior designers, scaling design culture across the org.
Founder, Researcher and Designer @ The GIN is IN (2009-present)
- Created the Gin Flavor Map, a research-led taxonomy now widely adopted across the spirits industry.
- Built a flavor search engine and app, growing to 900K+ annual visitors.
- Authored multiple books (70K+ copies sold in multiple languages)
- Published annual Gin Trends Report, providing consumer insights and data analysis to distillers worldwide.
Education
Masters in City and Regional Planning, Pratt Institute
- GPA 3.9
- Coursework includes: psychology of design, anthropological research methods, statistics, visual design
B.A. in Environmental Design , University at Buffalo,
- GPA 3.75
- Coursework in visual design, public presentation, statistics and research design
- Minor in English Literature and Writing.
- Won award for outstanding undergraduate research
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
Skills
- Product Strategy
- AI/ML Design
- DesignOps
- UX Research
- Product Design
- Prototyping
(including in code) - Data Analysis
- ResearchOps
- Interaction Design
- Information Architecture
- Data Visualization