Markham, Ontario, Canada
I am a product strategy, research, design and management leader based in the Greater Toronto Area. I have been producing innovative, value-generating digital products, services and experiences for over 15 years for organizations including Hasbro, NASA, TD Bank and Staples Canada (among many, many others.) My passion is helping to achieve desired outcomes by deeply understanding customer problems, facilitating strategy creation, building empowered teams, leveraging great design and content, and applying new and novel uses of technology. I have broad understanding of a variety of organization types and industries including e-commerce, banking, insurance, entertainment, gaming, telecommunications, government and many more. Here is an overview of my skills: Leadership - Building empowered teams that love delivering value to customers and the business - Developing product visions and principles that foster long term customer and employee loyalty - Creating deep relationships with stakeholders, partners and customers to ensure value-creation outcomes are met Research - Conducting qualitative and quantitative research to identify opportunities that inform product and business strategy - Leading customer-centric research projects (e.g. Jobs to be Done, Indi Young cognition patterning) to create solid foundations for strategy and innovation - Evangelizing the importance of balancing quantitative data with qualitative to ensure the full picture is known Strategy - Identifying appropriate strategies based on understanding of underserved and overserved customer needs and business objectives - Conducting competitive and trends analysis discovery - Facilitating strategy workshops to identify the best opportunities to pursue aligned with strategy Product Management - Building deep relationships with engineering and design and facilitating continuous discovery activities - Identifying segments of customers with unmet needs and empowering teams to find innovative solutions that achieve desired outcomes. - Ensuring ethical standards and legal compliance is proactively managed to mitigate risk Design and Content - 15 years experience in UX design and 7 years experience as a content writer, editor and strategist working in product, sales and technology-oriented organizations. 10 years experience in digital agencies as an employee and freelancer has given me wide exposure to many clients and industries. - Built, contributed to and helped to manage design systems at numerous organizations - Designed for desktop, mobile, headset and digital / physical environments
Contract and fractional human-centered design and product management services including: - Product innovation, leadership and experience strategy - UX, product and service design - Product management and strategy - User research - Accessibility
Player-coach leading and managing customer research and strategy team for omnichannel e-commerce company. - Managed a team of researchers conducting foundational and evaluative research to understand customer needs for Staples Canada B2B and B2C digital platforms and in-store experiences. - Personally conducted problem space research with B2B and B2C customers to identify areas of opportunity for Staples. - Led foundational Jobs to be Done (JTBD) study to conduct behaviour-based market analysis identifying 13 unmet needs for Staples small business customers. Conducted frequent JTBD information sessions to inform stakeholders unfamiliar with the framework on the benefits. Trained JTBD team from 0 to practitioner level. - Planned and facilitated cross-functional workshops and thoughtful design thinking exercises to creatively and collaboratively solve customer problems to achieve desired business outcomes. - Initiated continuous discovery practices to inform product, design, engineering and business teams to identify product opportunities that aligned with our understanding of the customers' JTBD. - Oversaw research democratization efforts to increase research output and redirected researchers to higher impact work, while supporting and improving the ability for others in the organization to understand customer problems and evaluate solutions.
Defining and building the product design and user research group within a newly created division devoted to building high quality mobile and tablet apps for children aged 2-5. My role fell into three main categories of work: UX Strategy - Synthesizing qualitative and quantitative research data sources to create Customer Journey diagrams to ensure alignment with customer needs during product development - Planning and facilitating customer-centered design activities like design sprints, journey mapping sessions, and qualitative research projects for new products - Collaborating with Product Managers and other business stakeholders to ensure the balance of customer and business value was being achieved and plan the product design strategy Design Operations - Recruiting and managing a diverse and empowered team of product designers - Leading weekly team meetings and design critiques for UI and UX deliverables, conducting weekly 1:1 sessions, fostering a safe environment where people feel comfortable having difficult discussions - Helping to implement dual-track agile practices for the design team within the division - Standardized design software and initiated the creation of a division-wide design system to ensure scalability and consistency for multiple products - Estimating timing and allocation of UX resources for design tickets - Established universal product principles to provide guardrails for teams developing experiences for their customers Research Operations - Recruited and managed in-house research team as well as collaborating with external vendors - Oversaw the creation of research standards of practice and the handling of PII (of particular concern because we were dealing with children's data and privacy) - Documented and shared insights from research studies - Conducting requirements gathering and analysis for research software including research repository software and remote testing
Building on my earlier work at TD, in this role I took a UX lead role on designing a multi-product application flow for regular banking products. (In my previous stint at TD, I had contributed to the design of a similar application for investment products). In this role I created high-fidelity interactive prototypes, wireframes, user flows and functional specifications for an application form that was to set the standard for future functionality and provide a scalable framework for the inclusion of multiple types of financial products that may have different information capture requirements. As part of this work, I also contributed to the creation of interactive responsive elements for the TD Design System that incorporated the new standards created from the multi-product application.
I worked on three main things throughout the tenure of this role: • Collaborated with the creative and technology teams on an immersive AR projection mapping experience based on Alice in Wonderland • Worked in partnership with senior leadership to launch the eOne Innovation Lab. Created and facilitated design sprint workshops for internal projects and external collaborations with partners such as Lego • Led the experience design of a virtual reality SaaS product for managing VR content and content rights using blockchain technology