Case Studies

I’ve been working in design and tech for almost two decades. I can say that I’ve learned and grown from every project I’ve ever worked on. Below are a couple from the last few years. If you’d like to dig into full presentations, go here. 

Aviame

Aviame’s mission was to give individuals the power of their own data. We founded the company in the midst of the trauma of 2020 with the idea that a person’s data is part of their personhood and therefore they should be the ones to control it, manage it, and ultimately profit for it if they so choose. Over the course of a year we accomplished and incredible amount of work bootstrapping with 10 talented and passionate individuals who believed in the cause of Data Justice to create a prototype for a universal data privacy controller.

Accomplishments

  • Recruited and hired a team of 10 researchers, designers, and developers 
  • Conducted research with dozens of people to drive product insights
  • Built a working prototype including a NFC ring integration
  • Launched the #DataJustice initiative, blog, social media, and podcast
  • Created Aviame.com 
  • Developed an extensive business and marketing plan

Learning & Growth

Due to my limited experience with raising capital I relied on my business partner to create a funding plan. Unfortunately the strategy of targeting only a small number of investors was faulty and by the time we pivoted to a new broader strategy we’d run out of capital. Despite continuing investor interest we were unable to continue to self-fund and we dissolved the company in October 2021.

TrainDems.org

Run by the National Democratic Training Committee (NDTC), TrainDems.org was founded to help aspiring community leaders navigate running for office. I joined NDTC in 2018 as the Director of Product & Technology when there were only 7 employees and got my feet wet in politics with the mid-term elections. By the time I left I was the CTO/CXO and the organization had grown to more than 50.

Accomplishments

  • Built a product and tech team from the ground up including hiring, establishing processes, design and dev ops, IT ops, and internal security policies and procedures
  • Led research, design, and development of a complete re-design and re-build of traindemocrats.org
  • Established org-wide goal-setting and tracking mechanisms
  • Led product, tech, content, design, marketing, and data teams and established roadmaps, goals, and milestones for an org of 30+ employees
  • Increased traffic by more than 300%, increased conversion by 400%, increased registered users by 800% over 2.5 years 

Learning & Growth

Managed two zero-day attacks and got a crash course in security operations and established safeguards, training, and processes and policies that prevented future security breaches. 

Amazon.com

Amazon’s Self-service Performance Advertising team generates billions of dollars of income for Amazon. As a design leader at Amazon, I managed an incredible team of cross-functional content strategists, designers, and researchers. Our mission was to continually improve the advertiser-facing experience, a complex and sophisticated set of tools that allow advertisers to target the right audience for their products.

Accomplishments

  • Hired 3 senior-level designers and promoted one designer to L6 within my first year.
  • Improved velocity of the team by 50% in the first 6 months through the application of process and management improvement
  • Developed and nurtured a user-centered culture through monthly UX talks, an art installation along the walls of Doppler featuring user insights, motivations, and goals, and adaptive agile research efforts that infused insights into rapid development processes and mechanisms

Learning & Growth

Amazon has a way of doing business that is relentless in the pursuit of success according to the metrics and goals set by leadership. I brought my own ideas about working hard for the customer, team building, and nurturing employees that weren’t always compatible with the status quo. I naively imagined that my credentials, ideas, and actions would be viewed on the same merits as my male peers. Unfortunately they weren’t. I learned a lot about how to stand up for myself as a leader and how to better communicate and empathetically support others struggling with seeing and understanding gender bias in the workplace.