Leadership Initiatives

I implemented strategic programs across 14 different product portfolios through a scalar leadership approach—scaling up, wide, and deep. This comprehensive strategy transformed how engineering and product teams address design challenges and increased team capacity through structured evaluation and growth frameworks.

Design Programs & Actions

Design Excellence & Operations

As a team lead, I revolutionized design infrastructure through multiple key programs. The Design Hub became our centralized collaboration platform, standardizing practices across all product portfolios, and a comprehensive Design Handbook established clear design practices and strategic direction. My team’s UX Tooling Strategy integrated Figma, Mural, and Lucidchart, significantly reducing documentation time. We implemented AI-driven interventions to improve compliance and design system adoption while creating new design service offerings to support our growing product portfolios.

Research & Innovation

I transformed the team’s research capabilities through three major initiatives. The Minimum Viable Research (MVR) Model streamlined research processes and established clear deliverables for product development. Our Enterprise AI Research Platform reduced documentation time and accelerated self-service design support by 45% across 30 teams. The Design Metrics Framework implemented product-led growth measures to track user engagement and product adoption across all portfolios, providing actionable data for improvements.

Team Development & Culture

One of my key leadership goals was to improve the team culture. Through my leadership, the team culture evolved through structured programs providing access to belonging initiatives, growth opportunities, and resources. The Design Muscle Program delivered weekly educational sessions to elevate team maturity in craft, theory, and industry innovations. We implemented the Design Pulse Framework for monthly feedback and accountability. Our Career Development Matrix created comprehensive growth paths across 14 dimensions, ensuring clear professional development opportunities for every team member.

Cross-Functional Integration

I practiced the Scalar Leadership Approach extensively, and it helped enhance team cohesion and cross-functional collaboration. This framework helped build engineering trust by enhancing relationships through our engineering-design Sync Model. I also applied the Transition Design Framework, a spillover from my Ph.D. research that helped implement design changes across the organization while ensuring alignment with business objectives and stakeholder needs.

Leadership Impact

Scale Deep (Short-Term Impact)

My short-term impact in leading the design team saw us optimize processes, improved design workflows, and reduced documentation time. These operational enhancements built trust and cohesion in the team, creating foundations for effective collaboration and transparent communication. The changes also helped me build credibility so I could become a leader my team trusted, which increased acceptance of my ideas.

Scale Wide (Mid-Term Impact)

My small success with my immediate design teams made my designers a key advocate for my initiatives, which in turn allowed my team to build credibility with other team members, such as product managers and designers. This advocacy allowed me to establish trust with cross-disciplinary teams and improved visibility, especially with engineering managers who control the yearly budgets on which my designers depend. My monthly meetings with engineering managers helped me to build relationships with most of them, and I became a key point of contact for product design. Most importantly, the design team achieved active participation in roadmap planning, where research and design now influence product strategy during H1 and H2 planning.

Scale Up (Long-Term Impact)

My leadership strategy improved the design team, who, at the time of my arrival, were siloed designers working in different teams within Meta. My leadership helped advance the design team from Level 1 to Level 3, ultimately transforming design's role within Meta's EISA division. We expanded design's influence among non-designers and reinforced design-driven projects with greater purpose, establishing design as a key strategic asset integrated with engineering, product management, and project management.

Leadership Initiatives

My work focused on developing research methods and strategies that integrated the Transition Design approach with LGID. These strategies center local cultural practices through human-centered design principles. This transdisciplinary approach strives to develop adaptive solutions in the complex public sector through research and engagement.

Design Programs & Actions

Research & Innovation

Our research journey began with developing and refining the LGID framework, which blends human-centered design with local governance practices. We created a standardized approach that made our insights accessible and actionable across different government agencies. This process helped us move beyond traditional bureaucracies by gaining support across multiple sectors.

Stakeholder Engagement

We ran hands-on workshops that created direct dialogue between government officials, civil society representatives, and citizens. These sessions, both online and in-person, became crucial spaces for co-creation and built trust between stakeholders. We extended our reach by building partnerships with NGOs, academic institutions, and government agencies across Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Mexico, Brazil, Cape Verde, and Kenya, creating a network of change-makers committed to improving governance.

Capacity Building

Instead of providing solutions, we focused on enabling local teams to drive innovation. We developed LGID training modules that helped practitioners implement these principles in specific contexts. The program emphasized knowledge sharing and mutual learning. We also helped government leaders understand how to leverage appropriate technology for improved governance, ensuring all solutions aligned with local infrastructure and capabilities.

Leadership Impact

Short-Term Impact

The early lessons from our engagement have helped us understand how best to embed designers within a local context. The failures and successes have also helped us better understand that a designer must have a grounded, place-based mindset for interventions to work. Within the first year, we built foundational resources that people who wanted to positively affect the government could immediately use. Most importantly, we created an active community of practice where governance innovators actively share challenges and opportunities.

Mid-Term Impact

The documentation of learning case studies is building a repository of our methodology beyond initial partner countries. The goal is to improve and reshape how design thinking applies to governance challenges in emerging economies. The MIT GOV/LAB platform has enabled sustainable knowledge-sharing processes, reaching practitioners across multiple continents. This growing network of governance innovators is actively sharing insights and adapting methodologies to their local contexts.

Our vision is to establish LGID as a recognized methodology in governance innovation, moving away from traditional intervention models. We're developing replicable frameworks that help governments develop locally appropriate approaches for citizen engagement that can be adapted to different cultural contexts, increasing the probability of locally driven innovation.

Leadership Initiatives

My goal in the year was to accelerate Consumer Reports' research capabilities.

Design Programs & Actions

Research Excellence & Operations

After creating a robust data infrastructure to conduct and house research data, my focus was to help build automated analysis frameworks. I implemented standardized methodologies across product teams and a centralized research participant management platform that improved data accuracy and accessibility. These improvements streamlined our research-to-design pipeline, allowing product teams to generate insights faster.

Digital Venture Research & Innovation

The research initiatives accelerated the ongoing innovation-viable product research, leading to the development of two new products under the Consumer Report brand. The first product, Upkept, is a home maintenance platform. My leadership helped deliver an analysis of user needs and a series of market validation studies, equipping the research team with practical methods and frameworks. With the other product, CRInvest, I guided end-to-end user research for the financial advice tool, ensuring a strong product-market fit. My work in developing a systematic approach to competitive analysis and market positioning for this product became adopted as a standard that supported strategic decision-making across new ventures.

Team Development & Process Optimization

My processes helped to build unified research approaches across six research and design teams for consistent outputs. I used regular sharing sessions and methodology workshops to keep all units aligned, creating a culture of continuous learning and improvement across the organization.

Leadership Impact

Short-Term Impact

In the year I was at Consumer Reports, I implemented an automated research analysis framework and data infrastructure repository that immediately reduced research overhead time. Teams saw significant improvements in data accuracy and accessibility, transforming how quickly we could move from research insights to design decisions. The standardization of methodologies across six research teams created consistency and efficiency in our work – while significantly reducing research-to-design cycles.

Leadership Initiatives

As Senior Product Designer at PTC, I led the user experience strategy for AR/AI products serving over 1 million enterprise users. Through implementing three core methodologies—field-based user research, iterative AR prototyping, and AI-enhanced user testing—I drove the transformation of industrial AR applications while collaborating directly with manufacturing partners across 40 industrial locations.

Design Programs & Actions

Cross-Platform AR Experience & Operations

Vuforia Chalk Development: Led the creation of an intuitive remote assistance interface used by 1M+ enterprise users daily, establishing new standards for industrial AR applications.

Platform Integration Framework: Developed unified experience architecture across web, mobile, and RealWear AR interfaces, ensuring consistent user experience across all platforms.

Design System Standards: Created comprehensive AR interface guidelines and standardized design patterns for industrial AR applications, accelerating development cycles while maintaining consistency.

AI-Enhanced Manufacturing Solutions

Expert Capture Tool: Developed AI-guided UX systems that significantly reduced training time and improved operational accuracy across manufacturing operations.

Real-time Object Detection (RTOD): Created MVP with enhanced AI recognition capabilities that reduced spare parts order errors in the $2B industry.

Manufacturing Intelligence Framework: Implemented AI-driven analytics to optimize workflow patterns and improve operational efficiency.

Field Research & Implementation

Manufacturing Site Studies: Conducted comprehensive research across 40 industrial locations, documenting and analyzing industrial workflow patterns.

User Behavior Analysis: Established a systematic approach to capturing and analyzing industrial workflow patterns, creating actionable insights for product development.

Feedback Integration System: Created continuous improvement cycle with end-users, ensuring product evolution aligned with actual manufacturing needs.

Leadership Impact

Short-Term Impact

Implemented initial cross-platform AR interface for Vuforia Chalk, establishing immediate improvements in remote assistance capabilities. Achieved early adoption among manufacturing teams and demonstrated potential for scaling across industrial sites.

Mid-Term Impact

Developed and deployed AI-enhanced features through Expert Capture Tool, resulting in significant reduction in training time and improvement in operational accuracy. Expanded implementation across 40 industrial sites while refining the user experience based on field feedback.

Long Term Impact

Created lasting transformation in industrial manufacturing processes through AR/AI integration, establishing new standards for remote assistance and work instruction. The implemented frameworks continue to drive innovation in industrial AR applications, supporting PTC’s position as a leader in manufacturing technology.

My systematic approach to industrial AR/AI design transformed PTC’s impact in the manufacturing sector. Through comprehensive field research and user-centered design methodologies, we successfully developed and implemented AI-guided UX solutions that delivered measurable improvements in efficiency and accuracy. The success of Vuforia Chalk and Expert Capture Tool demonstrated the effectiveness of our integrated approach to AR/AI innovation. These initiatives helped reposition PTC’s design function from traditional UI development to strategic AR/AI experience innovation, directly contributing to PTC’s goal of revolutionizing industrial manufacturing through advanced technologies. The transformation has established new standards for industrial AR applications while delivering substantial business impact in the $2B industry through improved efficiency and reduced errors.