I’ve joined Algolia to widen my influence and UX practice to solve interesting business problems and influence product and engineering teams. My role here includes leading a number of Product teams focused on Merchandising, Generative AI, and ML-powered Recommendations. I also lead the Product Design and Research teams, as well as a team that builds and manages InstantSearch, our industry leading UI library that powers thousands of search interfaces.

In addition to some of the work supporting UX teams listed below, here are some more highlights of this role so far:

• I lead a number of product teams focused on Merchandising, Generative AI, ML-powered Recommendations, and Frontend Platforms. These teams have shipped many exciting new directions for Algolia and Algolia’s customers, especially in the critical e-commerce category. One of these releases is Algolia's Generative Shopping Guides, which utilizes customers' search indexes to generate and summarize unstructured content rapidly. This and many other exciting GenAI products are in active development - each of these focus on baking in great UX defaults that are intuitive to customers, reduce integration complexity, and mitigate typical GenAI risks of safety and hallucination.

• I also lead a strong UX and Frontend engineering team that develops InstantSearch, our industry leading, open-source Search UI Library. This library powers thousands of search experiences on the Internet and is regularly referenced and used by competitors and partners. We’ve shipped some incredible improvements to the InstantSearch experience - this includes easily capturing customer events to improve their search quality, integration of Algolia Recommend to allow customers to easily power their Search and Discovery with a single UI, and release an overhauled React InstantSearch that has since become our most popular library.

Highlights:

• Established a foundational research practice at Algolia by securing buy-in and investing in a strong mixed methods research team that has become fundamental to how products are shaped, built, and refined at Algolia. This team has educated and built an appetite across the organization for not just more research, but also a nuanced understanding of how it can inform our R&D and Marketing practice. This team has set up a number of executive CABs, built and managed a Research Participant Database, and defined a comprehensive set of personas informed by 1200+ prospects and customers that were recruited, interviewed, clustered, and mapped into segments that are relied on by our GTM and R&D teams.

• Restructured our Product Design team - this included securing buy-in for a dedicated Design Systems owner, transitioning the team to an embedded partnership model, establishing a constructive-yet-thorough UX review practice, and driving closer collaboration between design and product teams. Through this, a number of mission critical Algolia products were developed including Algolia’s Merchandising Studio that is essential for our for e-commerce customers. In partnership with our growth team, the team released hundreds of experiments to better understand and solve for business goals. We also modernized Satellite, our internal design system by developing new UX engineering workflows, visual and accessibility testing improvements, and a refresh to our visual design.

I founded the design systems practice at Twilio and grew a team from an ad-hoc, unsystemized front-end environment to a fully funded, staffed, and roadmapped discipline. Over time, this scope evolved to the entire spectrum of UX Infrastructure including content writing, visual design, and design operations and focused on alignment of design, engineering, and product to create great customer experiences.

My outputs were both tactical and cultural: setting product teams up for quick wins by providing resilient, performant UI, uplevelling the scale at which product design is delivered to an organization, and focusing on customer inclusion and happiness through inclusive design, UX engineering, content writing, and more.

Highlights:

• Proved value of and grew a team from a contributory capacity to a fully funded, dedicated UX practice at Twilio.

• Instituted a system of review, education, and enforcement of Accessibility and Inclusive Design practices.

• Secured buy-in and adoption of a new design system across 15+ BUs across Twilio, leading to a unification of technology stacks, significant payoff of technical debt, and improved shipping velocity.

• Led a redesign of Twilio's UI language that unified the look and feel of Twilio with multiple billion dollar acquisitions to give customers a familiar, modern, and single pane of glass to use.