Leadership
Team building
Influence
I believe in leading by example, especially in design.
I'm the definition of a player/coach design leader. I jumped into all my projects and helped deliver with my team of 10.
When the sitting VP of design left Kajabi in 2023, I found myself promoted to Manager of the whole 10 person team as the de facto Head of Product Design. I embraced the chaos, eager to grow during a transitional phase for the company.
The team had little structure, and the product needed major UX overhauls after 11 years of tech debt.
I still absolutely adore my Kajabi team and everyone I met there. Now, I’m excited to bring my design leadership to a new organization—whether that’s with or without direct reports.
Leadership is an opportunity to scale yourself
With a team of junior to senior-level designers, I saw a chance to teach—one of the greatest joys of having reports. I quickly introduced structure to our previously unstructured team. Here’s a snapshot of what I implemented:
Silent critiques: Enabled everyone to provide feedback simultaneously, giving quieter voices a chance to be heard.
Cross-team designer pollination: Connected designers working on similar projects by setting up domains.
Job ladders: Built job ladders and created IC and Manager tracks for the Product Design discipline.
Deep Dives: Organized sessions to analyze competitors as a group to learn from their successes and mistakes.
Hard skill workshops: Created spaces for team members to teach skills like auto-layout, Framer, basic animations, and design system fixes both within in the team and cross-functionally.
Soft skill development: Created opportunities for team members to improve communication by public speaking to the organization and the team.
Building strong relationships: Created strong connections with product, user research, PMM, engineering, and other teams, leading to better collaboration and influence as a team.
I gave my all to leading the team, and I learned a lot along the way.
I focused heavily on team culture, creating team standards for design excellence, and building psychological safety.
I fought hard for engineering resources to drive the product changes we wanted.
And perhaps most importantly, I've learned maintaining my own energy and avoiding burnout is crucial for ensuring my team has the psychological safety they need to achieve the impossible.
Project Highlights
Branded Mobile App Flows: Kajabi kicked off a new product creating custom iOS and Android apps, individually submitting each build to the App and Play stores. As you can imagine this was a huge undertaking. I stepped in with my designers to guide a newer-to-the-company PM who was still gaining intimate knowledge of the customer. This has become one of Kajabi's biggest money makers of recent memory.
AI Onboarding Experiment: Created the concept and launched an AI-driven onboarding tool to simplify the complex Kajabi app for new users.
Web App Redesign: Led the redesign of the app’s framework for a cleaner, more intuitive experience.
Long-Awaited UX Fixes: Delivered numerous small but impactful UX improvements that our customers had been requesting for years.
