Bird's eye view of my 9-year design career.

I joined FORM on a three-month contract improving their marketing website. In addition, the founders and head of brand & marketing sought a partial brand refresh.

My role required high-autonomy & the ability to handle many jobs—research, management, design, and development. This was primarily because the company was small and each member stretched thin. Also, my main collaborator, the head of Marketing & Branding was on paternity leave.

So, for collaboration, I met weekly on Friday's with the founders and product designer. I recapped the previous week's discussions and highlighted current exploration and proposals. I also met for daily stand-ups with the product & engineering team.

I kept the design process flexible. With each webpage (or marketing asset) we'd test the stylistic elements. I wanted to avoid the common agency 'hand off' where the team had to figure out 'how' to use the identity.

After 2 months we updated the identity (e.g. color, type, icons, illustrations) and created most of marketing pages. At that point I started developing the site which was launched after another month and a half.

My contract extended month to month as I worked on another project, a digital catalog. The catalog followed a similar process though I began coding earlier and focused more on the data and its relationships. When the catalog was ready for internal use I decided to find a position in New York City and transitioned to a part-time freelancer for FORM.

During my almost 5 years at Wheelhouse, I worked on numerous projects across several different teams. I joined in 2015 as the first design hire and 7th team member.

In 2015 through 2016, I worked with the core team to bring the first version of our Pricing Software to market. Designed for short-term rental owners, it offered a new, more personalized way to price a property. During this early phase we also re-branded to Wheelhouse (from PriceMethod). Working with Quinn and Michael, we renamed the company, re-branded the product (logos, illustrations, content) and created new marketing material.

With the foundation in place, our team continued our efforts to create the most personalized, intelligent pricing platform in the market. After leasing properties in multiple cities to test our pricing with, we decided to expand the company. The new company, Lyric, took aim at the hospitality industry, sitting in between Airbnb's offering and a conventional hotel.

In late 2017 and through 2018 I worked on a few different projects for Lyric [Learn more about Lyric below].

In 2019 I transitioned back to Wheelhouse full-time. While Lyric was expanding quickly the Wheelhouse team maintained a small, cross-functional team. I continued helping with the core product. We eventually doubled down by broadening the product, focusing on creating a more power pricing engine and UI that catered to professional revenue managers.

In 2020, in an effort to create new revenue opportunities, we created two new offerings, Market Reports and Competitive Sets. Covid had forced us to drastically downsize, both our offerings and team size. And so, myself and a small team of developers worked on getting these products to beta over a couple months. At this time I was leading our customer support team, managing the day to day projects, doing all of the design, and helping on the front-end development. In August, once we had Competitive Sets ready for Beta testing, I parted ways with the company.

Lyric grew out of Wheelhouse while we experimented with pricing our own short-term rentals. Within a few months we had assembled a team and began a branding process with Design Studio. I was still helping with Wheelhouse at the time but I took part in a number of branding initiatives. I also worked with Lyric to research, design and prototype the initial marketing website and booking process.

In the summer of 2018 I worked with Quinn and John, an engineer, to create a real-estate investment tool for Lyric. A real estate team member could enter a prospective location and view the necessary metrics and maps to determine the viability of building. They could then save this information and share it with the stakeholders as they moved into the next phase of the leasing process.

As we grew we moved into larger buildings and leased full floors. It was at this point, in late 2018 we saw significant issues with our cleaning operations. I teamed up with the head of product to create an application to manage it. It needed to be customizable for each building and needed a suite of features that both the in-house Lyric operations team, the local cleaning manager and their cleaners could use. Matt and I traveled around the country interviewing teams, researching existing solutions and documenting all of the processes and requirements over a number of months. I then worked with a number of internal team members to design, diagram and prototype the application code named Tidy.

As noted previously, in 2019 I moved back to full-time with Wheelhouse.

While at iCracked, I got my feet wet with development. However, I didn't feel I had the necessary skills to find another position that would allow me to do that. So, I applied for and was accepted to MakerSquare. I packed a couple bags and headed to Santa Monica for the summer of 2015.

During my time at MakerSquare I learned & utilized a number of things, including foundational elements like databases, algorithms, and javascript. I then learned about frameworks including Node, Angular and React.

The final month of the bootcamp involved building a real-world application with a team of 3 other students. My team built a mobile application for discovering new places to eat. This app, code named Mmmmystery was built using React Native and Node.

Joined as the seventh team member, and second designer. Initially focused on marketing efforts, including branding, social media campaigns, and promotional material like banners and brochures. During the first year I transitioned to more web development. Primary focus was on a new marketing layout, copy, illustrations and finally development.

During the second year I continued on web development and eventually transitioned to a more product design role. At this point we had 4 designers in total. In the latter half of the year I transitioned to a product design role, focusing on improving the repair experience. I also helped on a company rebrand.

In my last year I continued working on the product experience, specifically around creating two new product lines—trade-in and insurance. I also teamed up with two team members to work on a new mobile app experience.