Project Process

Hiring & Building Design Culture

I started with a deep dive into the existing design process and quickly saw that RocketReach needed UX designers, a design system, and strategic thinkers, while its one graphic designer was better suited to marketing. Once leadership agreed on the process and the velocity development could handle, I moved on bandwidth. Within three weeks I wrote the job descriptions, posted the roles, reviewed portfolios, ran interviews, and filled junior and senior UX positions. After the new hires ramped up, I moved our existing designer into a marketing role, where he raised the visual quality of our marketing content.

To keep the designers we hired, I set up pair-design mentoring sessions, protected time for learning and development, and ran blue-sky creative sessions where the team could experiment and take risks. The result was a team that felt valued and had room to grow.

Creative Strategy & Design Maturity

I partnered with RocketReach's founders, head of product, and C-suite to organize product priorities, personas, user journey maps, and roadmaps, so the new design process was tied directly to business goals. Those roadmaps gave the design team a clear direction and kept the work aligned with what users and stakeholders needed.

Once the team was up to speed, I started bi-weekly demos where designers presented their work to stakeholders across the company. The demos raised the quality of the work through early feedback, made progress on the roadmap visible, and increased the visibility of design across the organization.

* Some image details cannot be shared due to NDA.

Owning Brand & Marketing Creative

Before RocketReach had a marketing team, I ran all marketing creative. As the marketing team formed and then went through a leadership change, I kept the brand consistent across every channel. I led the brand refresh alongside the product UI redesign, so the product and the marketing speak with one visual voice.

Merging Agile & Design

Designing alongside agile development teams works when planning is transparent. Because my team sat in strategic planning sessions with stakeholders, we knew what was coming and could research, wireframe, and analyze our current solutions and competitors' flows before design sessions started. That made our designs faster to build and more effective.

* Some image details cannot be shared due to NDA.

One example is the bulk add flow. It was poorly named, hard to find, and underused. We redesigned it, cut the task from 17 clicks to 3, and moved its starting point so people could find it. Credit spend rose more than 200% within a month of launch.

Running a Lean Team with AI

I use Claude Code to automate team operations and work tracking, which saves more than 20 hours a week. I built 4 UX/UI skills and plugins and a design system reference that syncs from Figma daily, which cut dev handoff by weeks. The team prototypes in real code with production components, and we're bringing marketing page production in-house with Claude, replacing multiple freelancers.