What you’ll find here
A long-ish career that spans many roles, industries and sectors = a lot of material to work with.
But no one wants to read that novel. Not even me, really. So, these are brief stories about some of the work I’ve done since 2012.
A bunch of DocuSign — Perspective, work and impact on career ladders/hiring, design maturity, and enterprise-level facilitation.
Splash of Rush — While I wouldn’t say I did design work, this is a design-sh stroy about virtual care delivery.
Sprinkle of Avanade — about rapidly scaling a team to over 100 people in a design operations role.
Spoonful of MorningStar — how I approach designing services (Accessible Investing) and products (Modern Portfolio Theory), yes, including some UX deliverables I created.
Best. Workshop. Ever.
About 3 months after running an effective priority- and roadmap-combining workshop for two European teams, word got around, and I was asked to do another workshop for our Growth team.
At first it sounded rote and normal: a workshop about alignment and priority setting, with roadmap items emerging, but then... I learned there would be over 100 people, it would be in person, and the goals were ambitious for a DocuSign get-together.
What I did
So… I’m gonna need a bigger boat. I got to work on:
Designing eight hours of in-person ideation workshops spanning 2 days for 170 employees across all major functions — marketing, design, content, engineering, growth, and their leadership
Recruiting and prepping nine facilitators and a photographer to facilitate 30-person breakouts
Supporting the selection and organization of a venue that would hold all of these people, work for the activities I designed, and purchase all the supplies (have you ever bought and transported 200 Sharpies at once?)
How’d It Go?
The space was extremely… hotel beige. People started out ambivalent, not knowing what to expect. Pretty soon they were shoulder deep in (compostable) Post-its, making new connections, and building partnerships that wouldn’t have otherwise existed.
All the activities we did over two days.
Sounds fun, but what were the outcomes?
Most importantly for where DocuSign was at, I was able to
Facilitate conversations that built unified momentum for relevant business change that will continue for at least two years
Galvanize our product-led growth teams to action, exploring shared ideas for reaching ambitious goals that went into their OKRs
Help Growth executives build a successful case for the CEO to include the ideas we developed in the product team’s roadmaps
Make the Product Experience team look great at a moment when the products were under a lot of (warranted) experiential scrutiny
The most gratifying outcome was what people said to me afterward. I was approached by multiple people, including sponsoring execs, who told me that was the most effective, engaging gathering they’d ever attended for work.
I’d be happy to chat more about how I chose the activities I did, how I designed the interactions, and how I kept the energy up for two whole days in a beige ballroom. This piece would be much too long if I explained all that here!
Lastly, here’s an update from a design leader about a week after our workshop:
