Design - Build - Delight - Scale
About
I am a seasoned product & UX research leader, passionate about leading the design and build of solutions that both delight end users and empower customers to meet their business goals.
What sets me apart:
My obsession with creating customer delight
My comfort working with diverse complex technologies during roadmapping and product building
My consistent focus on driving organizational goals forward as efficiently as possible
My comfort making and owning tough decisions, even in the face of competing priorities, imperfect data, and long-term infrastructural implications for those decisions
My commitment to consistently seek out areas of opportunity to automate or scale existing processes and future use cases to amplify impact and ROI
I currently reside in Park Ridge (a suburb of Chicago, Illinois) with my husband, two tiny humans (i.e. my children), and one medium-sized dog (a pitbull mix aptly named Chomp).
Experience
Highlights
My product management career started here. I’m most proud of having led the team that delivered the E2E redesign of the UX and database architecture of Retirement Manager, an automated investment management platform with >$6.5 billion in AUM. We launched a Beta version of the product in under a year — and broke the record for new product development velocity at Morningstar.
In 2016, I was offered a product leadership role at Uptake, at the time one of the fastest growing startups in the world. There, I was able to rapidly iterate and deploy IoT solutions from scratch for companies like Caterpillar and manage a large diversity of both internal and external stakeholders.
As a product leader at Highland, I realized early on that existing product requirements/protocols would not lead to desired outcomes for either us or the customer in their current state; I therefore invested a large amount of focus farther upstream in the product development lifecycle in order to empower our build teams to better capture our customers’ wants and needs, leading to significantly positive outcomes for both Highland and clients (see resume).
Work Examples
Genioo
How do you build software that sets up business projects for success? What does it take for software to plan projects better than humans? How can software take project leaders from an idea to a workable plan?
Those were the problems Genioo, a cutting-edge global consulting firm specializing in delivering successful outcomes for large enterprise projects, wanted to solve with Highland’s help. I led the Software Build team that brought to life the very first iteration of the app.
Fulfill
A century-old financial services company wanted to offer a practical way to manage, track, save, and spend money in a way that allowed you to be consistent with your personal values.
I led the team that researched, designed, and built a web app that aggregated financial accounts, provided a framework to organize financial assets, and tracked your spending so that the way you manage money could stay in integrity with your personal values.
Highland Academy
Established companies must periodically pivot in order to stay relevant; at Highland, I was charged with the effort to lead the assessment of the desirability/viability of a possible future service offering during Spring 2020.
From the results, we decided to move forward with creating the service offering, an online training academy to teach research, design, and innovation methods, for which I had the great fortune of being able to lead the team from ideation to first paying customer in eight weeks.
Education
Wellesley College
B.A. Economics & French
I was very fortunate to be able to attend Wellesley for college, and so I decided early on that I would take advantage of every possible opportunity to both gain professional experience and contribute to the greater Wellesley community: Teaching Assistant (Economics 101) my freshman year; Resident Assistant my sophomore year; President of Alianza (a Latin-American interest group) my sophomore and junior years; and Student Supervisor at the Campus Police Department my junior and senior years, where I worked all four years as part of my work-study program.
I was also adventurous: Performed with Yanvalou, a Haitian-Brazilian drum-and-dance troupe; studied abroad in Paris during my last winter break; and spent summers volunteering in the slums of Guatemala City and Bogotá.
Startup Institute
Sales & Account Management
The Startup Institute was an intensive and highly selective eight-week course that prepared me for a career in startup environments. The Sales and Account Management track focused on gaining skills in order to excel at sales, account management, and business development.