Design Leadership

For the majority of my professional career, I have had the privilege of leading teams, and have thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of it.

A natural gravitation to leading has always been there for me – from sports, through university, and into my career. I thrive off of collaborating and helping to steer an endeavor to a successful end goal. Combined with my passion for design, this yielded several professional opportunities to embrace and run with.

As Project Manager

At my previous agency, while starting as an entry-level Designer/Developer, I was quickly elevated into a Project Manager role, where I spent several years bridging the gap between the clientele and internal team, ensuring that everyone had what they needed and everyone understood each other. I brought my design knowledge to each project, helping steer the creative direction while managing client presentations and requests to ensure understanding.

Key design-focused areas as Project Manager:

Ensured project structure and organization was efficient for allowing projects to succeed, both in the client and the agency’s eyes
Aligned team members with the scope and, therefore, the business strategy behind the scope itself.
Helped empower the client to embrace a design-led approach that our team was proposing

As Creative Director

With that design background, I helped carve out the position of Creative Director, where I fulfilled a higher purpose for the company’s offerings and quality output growth. This is also where I introduced a focal area on UX (and where my love for it truly began) to be an offering and a means to an improved product for clients, as well as championed the company’s rebrand from the ground up.

Key design-focused areas as Creative Director:

Outlined an appropriate design approach and strategy that my team could follow when preparing designs in order to meet quality and scope expectations, both for internal agency stakeholders as well as the client themselves
Defined design standards, including base principles and guidelines to adhere to, for ensuring a consistent brand experience both for the internal agency, as well as each client project.
Brought user perspective and experience to the forefront, introducing UX product offerings and factoring in best practices and user needs when making design-based decisions.
Provided creative direction at all appropriate milestones to ensure quality and effectiveness of what we were crafting for our clients was meeting our criteria
Helped to grow our team’s knowledge of their craft, both as a team and individually, and created goal-based growth plans for each team member to strive for – in an effort not only to help them grow professionally but to enrich the agency’s offerings and growth plan as well.

As Chief Operating Officer

Beyond this, I embraced the role of Chief Operating Officer, as I had naturally become one with the processes, clients, and methods to achieve targets. Leading an overall team of 10-15 designers, developers, project managers, and marketers, I worked diligently with each department to do everything possible to improve and become more efficient in output and quality. This included creative output, essential to the agency’s success, so my involvement did not shift far.

Key design-focused areas as Chief Operating Officer:

Promoted our design offerings and capabilities as an agency, working closely with our marketing team to curate and champion verbiage and materials that portrayed this.
Optimized and expanded these design offerings, changing focus to value-based selling (resulting in 25%+ margin increases on all work), while showcasing additional value on each without requiring additional resources to do so (updated portfolio portrayal, reusable components to allow more to be made with less, defining clarifying tactics with our development team that allowed our design team to be even more creative without needing to adhere to a simplistic base framework).
Embraced a design-led approach for our agency during our rebrand, focusing on the power of brand, presence, and experience to lead the way.
Continued the work I had been doing as Creative Director in constructing a growth plan for each team member by building out a talent tree of skills per department/focus area, with the goal of empowering team members to see what they have yet to learn and where that would take them in terms of reward and benefits.

Valuable overall accomplishments

From a UX perspective over my tenure, I was grateful to have:

Crafted UX products, such as quant/qual testing and behavior analytics

This included vetting third-party solutions, crafting product processes, collaborating on marketing material, assisting in the sales of the products, and presenting findings to the client.

Led transition to Figma as the predominant design tool

Coming from a Photoshop-driven process previously, this transition improved the agency’s quality of design output while reducing the design time required and making the handoff to the development team more effective.

Guided creation of reusable design system for all projects

Creating a base design system allowed our internal team to speak the same language. Our production team could work optimally and effectively without wasting time misunderstanding or crafting the same base elements again and again.

Oversaw 100+ custom websites from concept to completion

As I played every role at the agency, I designed, constructed, managed, optimized, and maintained all of the projects in some capacity, giving me the full picture of our offering – and, therefore, allowing me to hone our output towards perfection.

For more details on each of my positions and their roles/responsibilities, please see my resume.