Building teams that
outlast the plan.

The bank's consumer platform relied on third-party software facing deprecation. The vendor's updated solution offered limited customization, iframe-driven experiences, additional costs for functional changes, and dependency on their roadmap.

Assembled a focused design team for an 18-month redesign covering all platform features. Addressed known user pain points the previous solution couldn't accommodate, established scalable patterns for future iteration, and implemented design QA as formal quality control before every release.

• Delivered within 24-month deadline, ahead of peer institutions
• ~20–25% increase in digital channel adoption post-launch
• ~15% reduction in contact center call volume
• Delivered under budget with significantly lower long-term maintenance costs
• Established reusable component foundations accelerating feature delivery
• Design QA became a formal pre-release standard maintained across all releases

Built the internal design infrastructure from a 6-person team. At peak, 12 direct reports. Then navigated two major reorganizations: the first eliminated two designers overnight; the second transferred manager responsibilities entirely.

Moved quickly both times. After the first reorg, reallocated work to preserve delivery continuity, then restructured to prevent similar vulnerability. After the second, created a 30-day plan, communicated within days, and held sessions explaining what was known and what support was available. Managed up and down simultaneously.

• 100% delivery commitments met following the second reorganization
• Team maintained confidence with zero attrition from either reorg
• Achieved same delivery rate with fewer designers through operational efficiency
• Successfully transferred knowledge to new executive leadership without momentum loss
• Redirected approved headcount to establish a UX Research team

A new line of business required adopting the visual identity of the bank's parent company, with its own colors, typography, logos, and regulatory disclosures. The requirement arrived after technical and business requirements were already defined and design work had begun, across two teams moving in parallel: an in-house team and an external vendor I was supervising.

I went deep into the parent brand before doing anything else, studying their guidelines, mapping their UI patterns, understanding what made their visual language distinct from ours. From that, I built a sticker sheet that translated their system onto ours: color tokens, typography scales, component styles, logos, and disclosure treatments. It gave both teams something concrete to design against right away. Working alongside the Design System lead, I then got that mapping formalized as a dedicated theme within our system, implemented and enabled across both design and development. The vendor adopted the same foundation, so both teams were working against the same reference throughout.

• Both teams shifted to the new brand with zero impact to the project timeline
• A reusable, system-level theme (not a one-off patch) now lives in the design system for ongoing use
• The vendor and in-house teams worked from the same foundation throughout, with no divergence between them
• No rework required on either side after the brand requirement arrived

When Applaudo expanded from a localized team to fully distributed in 2017, the challenge was cohesion across time zones. Designers who once worked side-by-side were now spread across countries.

Created regularly cadenced design huddles with three goals: sharing context across work streams, developing skills, and building culture. The format included a shared card in Figma (weekly work, solved challenges, "emotional pets"), plus rotating sessions: Fresh Eyes (rapid-fire critique), Design Talks (practice-relevant topics), and AMA (cross-functional guests).

• Cohesive team trust across designers who had never worked together before
• Shared context enabled rapid pickup of unfamiliar work during reorganizations
• Process improvements surfaced in huddles achieved higher team adoption
• Measurably stronger presentation and facilitation skills among designers
• Created psychological safety enabling faster cross-team problem-solving