Drawing from training in anthropology, linguistics & psychology, my experience over 20+ years ranges from ethnomusicology in West Africa to defining and launching transformational zero-to-one products, leading digital product and UX teams, and evangelizing and implementing human-centric product process.

RECENT EXPERIENCE

EPAM: Senior Director, Experience Consulting  (2013-2024)

Designed strategic product and service design engagements to grow productive, collaborative teams and long-term client relationships. I led globally-distributed teams (including Ukraine, Belarus, Colombia, Mexico, Canada) and travelled across the country and Europe conducting research, leading workshops and guiding teams. Clients included Pearson, Schneider Electric, Google, Bristol Myers Squibb, Perkin Elmer, Thomson Reuters, American Red Cross and Forrester Research. Some successes:

• Awarded the CEO Leadership Impact Award for my work with Pearson to launch their new DTC ecommerce on Pearson.com. We doubled DTC revenue in the first 3 months, and I grew EPAM's relationship from less than $1M to $4M.

• Led ethnographic research teams to frame product vision for Bristol Myers Squibb, Forrester Research and Perkin Elmer: looking over the shoulders of chemists as they searched for research results, talking with product leads in Silicon Valley on how to share better insights, and observing experimentation in multi-million dollar academic research laboratories. We shared and socialized insights iteratively with stakeholders and senior leadership to ensure that our vision could flow smoothly into product development.

• Framed and led zero-to-one and iterative product launches for Pearson, Vanguard and Bristol Myers Squibb. Designed and implemented product experimentation and ongoing user research programs providing quantitative and qualitative product feedback to drive ongoing enhancement and new feature & opportunity identification.

• Managed and guided a cross-functional (design/research/strategy) UX team based in EPAM's Pennsylvania offices

• Provided thought leadership and mentored global EPAM teams on research practice, strategic experience consulting, service design and product management.

• Pioneered dual-scrum process (n-1 design sprints) at Pearson to address communication and collaboration blockers between design and development teams. My process enabled, for the first time, consistent on-time monthly releases during my nearly two year tenure.

• Facilitated sprint-based co-creation with research chemists, drug development leadership, experience designers, and technologists and developers to envision and launch a bespoke knowledge management and collaboration platform for Bristol Myers Squibb.

G2: Director, User Experience  (2007-2013)

Grew the UX team for G2's Philadelphia office (a WPP Group global digital agency), with a focus on research and strategic experience design. Clients included Hertz, Campbell's Soup, Merck, Sungard and Savana.

• Redesigned Hertz's end-to-end digital reservation process. Led task-based deconstruction of end-to-end experience, from search to confirmation. Workshopped weekly with marketing and technology to align perspective and ensure feasibility of approach and conducted iterative in-person usability testing to refine experience. Presented prototype and recommended roadmap to e-commerce leadership (including Hertz's CMO).

• Reimagined Hertz's NeverLost navigation UI in collaboration with Hertz's industrial design teams, who were exploring improvements to the NeverLost hardware. Our solution simplified choices and improved navigation and defined the experience framework for the 2013 NeverLost relaunch.

• Led ethnographic research to enable a modular redesign of Savana's BPM platform. Brought key customer challenges to life for Savana's leadership team via customer case studies, personas, and a design system for rapid scaling.

• Designed and conducted a 40-person global research study to gather customer needs and test concepts for Sungard's planned site consolidation. Led content strategy and experience design to harmonize disparate line of business websites and create a framework for extension and growth.

Mentor, ADP List (Current)

I mentor early- to mid-career designers, business analysts and product folks to grow and deepen their skillsets around Product strategy, Product/design process, UX research, and Collaborative team leadership. You can find my mentor profile on ADPList.org.

ACTIVITIES, AWARDS & PRESENTATIONS

Cross-Family Collaboration to Drive Growth, Client UX Conference, Malvern, PA (2023)

Case study, approach (connection, cadence and context) and lessons learned from leading a project that required orchestrating collaboration across distributed (and sometimes siloed) product, experience and technology teams.

CEO Leadership Impact Award, EPAM Systems (2020)

Awarded by EPAM’s CEO for “delivering outstanding results and distinguishing myself amongst my peers in creating value for clients, developing people and growing EPAM's business.”

Iterating Understanding: Participant Observation for Product Design, ReCON17, New York, NY (2017)

Interactive talk at ReCon 17 (NYC) on the iterative, co-creation product development approach I used with BMS (see Recent Work for more details on the project). Read the slides.

Knowledge Management for Agility and Speed, 3rd Life Science Knowledge Management Summit, Philadelphia, PA (2016)

The role of knowledge management in achieving organizational speed and agility and an “agile” case study in developing knowledge management software, based on work with BMS. Read the slides.

A Foot-Based Reanalysis of Edge-in Tonal Phenomena in Bambara, (co-authored with Sharon Rose), 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Seattle (2006)

Optimality Theory-based reanalysis of tone distribution in Bambara provides a simple, elegant accounting that aligns with Zoll's Optimal Tone Mapping model. Read the paper.

Fulbright Foreign Scholarship, Mali (1996-1997)

Awarded year-long scholarship to conduct ethnomusicology on the social role of music in Mande society in Mali, West Africa.

EDUCATION

University of California, San Diego,  M.Sc, Linguistics & cognitive science

Carleton College, Northfield, MN BA, magna cum laude, Sociology/Anthropology