I’m Jess, an eccentric product designer with eight-plus years of experience, passionate about creating scalable human-centered experiences!
Leads work and life with empathy, humility, and grace. Loves using strategic problem-solving skills to define relationships between business objectives, user challenges, product management, and design.
My Work
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Building a "Better" Bid Management System
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UX Design in Action: Revamping the EstateSales.NET Refund Workflow
What it’s like to work with me
My Design Principles
Be Helpful
Use the resources you have available to you to help your users, the business, and your coworkers. Help the most amount of people and hurt the least. Make the hard decisions.
Ethics-First Decision-Making
Remove Bias and understand your own, with the help of reflection, diversity insight, and research by prioritizing accessibility over beauty or novelty, and nurture an environment where ideas can be freely shared without fear of judgment.
Intentional About Design
Understand the needs of both users and the business by focusing on the problem and the purpose, keeping in mind both effects on today and the future, determining success/failure, and always thinking about maintainability and scalability.
Experience
I’m a human-centered, business-minded designer deeply committed to solving complex problems with scalable and straightforward solutions with 7+ years of experience in the SaaS start-up environment. Strengths include leading with empathy, having grace, and using strategic problem-solving skills to define direct relationships between company objectives, user challenges, product management, and design.
EstateSales.NET
2012 - May 2022
Established and built the product department, which pivoted the company direction to become a more user-centric organization helping grow from 1.2M dollar market value in 2014 to 6M dollar market value and from 1.3M monthly users to 3.6M monthly users.
Product Design Manager/PM
2021 - May 2022
Served as the central point of contact for cross-departmental projects. Facilitated meetings, kept everything on track, and helped executive staff craft their vision into reality
Initiated a video review process that resulted in increased dev/product productivity and improved company communication
Mentored designers and encouraged professional growth. Regularly supported side projects and promoted a healthy work-life balance
Protected my team’s collective energy as the filter for time and attention requests so that the team could have the space to create great experiences
An active participating member of the team contributing to different design deliverables, design discovery, and workshops
Lead Product Designer < Product Designer
2014 - 2021
Participated in user research, both quantitive and qualitative, and leveraged findings artfully that influenced the business to prioritize features that drove our NPS score to 77 (out of 100)
Successfully led multiple projects, delivering complex and scalable designs for mobile, desktop, and web applications for the leading estate sale advertising platform, contributing to the company's broader efforts to improve user experience, design culture, and processes across my team and organization
Helped translate ideas and feedback into their underlying problems and created solutions in varying levels of fidelity using whiteboard sketches, wireframes, flow charts, and interactive prototypes
Made compromises that respected scope, effort, and user experience in a fast-paced, agile environment
Continually improve the product strategy and process. An example: is including the dev team more in discovery to help gauge effort and insight. This enabled us to focus on low-effort, high-impact solutions over the high-effort, low impact and created a better relationship between the teams.
Spearheaded the adoption of the Material Design System that sped up the production since we were no longer maintaining and creating a custom style guide
Customer Support Agent
2012 - 2013
Used empathy when hearing and spotting customer complaints to provide quick workarounds related to the customers’ pain points
Maintained a high level of customer satisfaction through effective verbal and written communication
My Creative Process
Let me start with that no project is the same, and this process is a general idea of how I have run with my design team and my process. Different projects may skip over things and rearrange the order, which is okay because the design process isn’t linear. But we generalize it so that we can communicate different stages within the process and the effort that goes into those.
A Few Books Who Influenced My Craft and Process
If you love books, like I do, and want to learn more about how I've shaped my processes over time, be sure to check out the books below! I've recommended them to all the individuals I've mentored over the years.