Using design to incite change, unlock creativity, drive innovation, and design products that help us do more in delightful ways.
I've had the opportunity to lead design teams, scaling startups from early to late stages, and growing mature design organizations at AWS and Meta. My focus has always been on designing and delivering innovative, well-crafted products that fulfill a vision, delight customers, and drive business results.
Rippling is described as a "compound startup" with over 30 products serving HR, IT, Finance, and other teams. It is building an OS for work, freeing smart people to focus on solving complex problems. As VP of Design, I led the design team to think deeply about each product, feature, and use case, and ensure that all products came together to create a cohesive, seamless user experience across all products in the platform. We focused on designing components, patterns, and building blocks that created a high quality product experience and enabled faster product development.
At Meta, I led design for business messaging, focusing on creating seamless communication, interaction, and transaction experiences for consumers, businesses, and developers across Meta’s family of apps. We built out a vision for messaging experiences and designed a broad portfolio of products covering use cases such as commerce, marketing, lead generation, customer relationship management, promotions, and re-engagement. This involved close collaboration with Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger teams to bring these products to market. To build trust with consumers and businesses, we focused on quality to uphold Meta's high design standards and execution to grow the business.
At AWS, I led a portfolio of products across payments, marketing engagement, cloud insights and analytics, developer tools for mobile app development, government digital transformation, and contributed to refreshing AWS’ design system. The scope was broad and involved systems thinking to define and leverage common patterns that created a compelling and consistent experience for AWS customers in the various cloud services they used, along with designing and shipping products and features to grow the engagement and revenue in the different teams.
As VP of Design and Experience at ThoughtSpot, I joined early, helping to transform it from a tech-first to a design-first company. I built the global design team of Product Designers, UX Engineers, and User Researchers from 1-20 across Sunnyvale, Seattle, and Bangalore. My team has established human-centered design practices between design, product management, and engineering, created a culture of creativity, developed our product principles, built our Radiant design system and shipped innovative features in AI, search, and data that have made ThoughtSpot a $4.2B+ plus company.
Prior to ThoughtSpot, I was Head of Design at Interana, a startup founded by Facebook engineers responsible for building its backend systems and enabling its unprecedented scale. These systems gave Facebook the ability to analyze user behavior and pioneer growth strategies, which have since become infamous in Silicon Valley. We designed and built a product that packaged this technology and best practices for user behavioral analytics. I led defining and designing the core set of features, which were based on extreme user research with growth hackers, shipping the first version of the product and establishing the brand for the company launch.
As an artist, I explored the notion of a post-human society rendered through technological disruption. New advances in technology give us the ability to alter our bodies in unprecedented ways, questioning what it means to be human. Being new to Silicon Valley, I was fascinated by these technological developments. This was my response to it. The objects are meant to look like real products, creating a suspension of belief and disbelief in the viewer, provoking conversations and hopefully a little humor as well. I enjoyed making them.
I enjoy giving back to the community through teaching and board memberships. I helped create a curriculum for innovation at Synapse School, an independent K-8 school in Silicon Valley. It's designed for teachers and students to apply in all subjects. It provides guidelines and methods to help students formulate hypotheses, prototype ideas, iterate solutions, think creatively, receive feedback and use storytelling skills. It implicitly teaches students innovation principles through a project based approach to academic knowledge acquisition and skills development.
I’ve taught classes in design at Stanford’s D.School in Needfinding - user research for designers, engineers, and MBA’s - and Design Strategy - blending business strategy frameworks with design thinking. I also write, speak, and teach about design. My articles about design strategy and product design have appeared in BusinessWeek, The Design Management Review, Rotman Magazine, and Forbes.