🎨 No design process? No problem.
Alongside the Product Operations team, the Director of Product, and the Director of Engineering, we established flexible and scalable processes that made sense for where the company was at in its growth. Creating UX-owned spaces in company tools like Atlassian and Slack created much needed transparency and helped teams understand and prioritize design needs.
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🙋🏽‍♀️ Asking stupid questions
Does anybody really want to use this? Why did we do that? Is this necessary? I found myself asking at least one of these questions in any given meeting. Sometimes, the thing that is obvious to everyone in the room just needs to be said. Design is meant to advocate for real people, and sometimes that means popping the hive-mind bubble and forcing the team to see things from a different perspective.

📝 Defining the undefined
Before I joined, the company was made up of 7 completely independent products–data, styles, layouts, nomenclature, and navigation were incompatible. But even with a vision for an all-in-one solution, internal teams struggled to communicate effectively and define work because we had no source of truth for how we should be talking about users, products, or features. After workshopping over the course of several weeks with various stakeholders in Marketing, Sales. Revenue, and Finance, we were able to align on and document terminology which allowed us to operate more uniformly across each and every team.

🎓 Mentorship
The reason I showed up to work every day was not because I loved creating software for churches. Helping other designers grow in their roles and find their voice at the company has been the most rewarding part of my time there. I empowered our junior designers to run internal workshops, interview customers for discovery, and truly understand what it means to own the UX direction and how to create space for that ownership.

📣 Context and communication
The path to providing a great user experience starts with buy-in from the company; you need everyone to be as excited about the thing you're designing so that they sell it, market it, build it, and support it to the best of their ability. If they don't understand why what you're doing a good idea, it's going to show in all corners of the product and experience. Cross-department communication and storytelling was where I spent a lot of my time; I was recognized as Tithely's product person of the year for helping internal teams stay in alignment which contributed to the overall success of our product.