Leadership
To me, being a leader is about cultivating a sense of purpose within a team, helping people grow and succeed, and streamlining processes to improve collaboration and efficiency.
I love contributing back to the UX community and the University of Washingotn HCDE department; I volunteered as a mentor for their Design for Passion program and spoke at a Women in UX event (far right).
Growing people through mentorship and coaching
Staying apprised of areas where team members want to grow is critical as a manager. After touching based with my reports on this in early 2024, I learned 2 designers on my team wanted to get better at leveraging quantitative data in their process. As a strong user of Indeed's main quantitative data tool, I developed a multi-part training for them and a few others. I maximized the training sessions by including their own areas of inquiry I solicited in advance, and by leveraging examples contextual to the product spaces they worked in. I measured their quantitative data confidence via several Likert scale questions before and after; their confidence increased 38% as a result of the training.
Collaborating cross-functionally to lead complex, strategic projects
The employer identity team at Indeed wanted to re-architect the employer data model to be more flexible and support a wider variety of use cases. I started helping the cross-functional team with 2 things: providing engineering with real-world examples of several client set-ups to make sure their plans would support those use cases and helping product identify and articulate user problems this work should aim to solve or support. As it became clear we needed more UX support on this project, I scheduled an engineering deep dive to get UX contributors and leaders up to speed on this complex and technical effort. I delegated a designer on my team to be the UX lead and supported them through scheduling and facilitating a cross-functional workshop to align on what this initiative was hoping to accomplish and why. My involvement and leadership here built cross-functional trust and set this complex and technical initiative up with a strong, user-centered trajectory.
Influencing product strategy and encouraging big-picture thinking
Indeed product leaders focused on the acquisition workflow and user growth wanted time-consuming research conducted to understand barriers to employer user growth, but I knew we already had this information buried and distributed throughout our research archives. I compiled a comprehensive, yet digestible literature review of existing research to accomplish the same goal. At the center of these compiled findings were multiple themes that told a larger story: barriers to user growth went beyond our acquisition workflow and were distributed across dozens of products often lacking foundational or table-stakes capabilities. I was able to facilitate bigger-picture thinking among these leaders, we saved time and money by not conducting duplicative or overly narrow research, and VPs and EVPs leveraged my documentation to inform product strategy for dozens of teams.