Research & Design Lead — Nava Labs | Dec 2025 - present

Research & Design Lead — Modernizing WIC systems | Oct 2024 - Dec 2025 | Leading research & design strategy for the first year of Nava's work to modernize USDA Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) case management systems that support 88 state agencies & 10K WIC clinics manage benefits and 6.8M WIC participants access nutritious foods, nutrition education, breastfeeding support, and referrals to mitigate chronic disease. In partnership with USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), National WIC Association (NWA) & Code for America (CFA).

Shaping the delivery & technical implementation of the State of Minnesota's paid family & medical leave programs, by conducting user research with medical & benefit providers and utilizing findings to inform product decisions, in collaboration with a wide range of cross-functional teams & Minnesota staff.

Grammarly is used by 30M people & 70K teams worldwide to up-level their communication by providing comprehensive situational & goal-oriented writing guidance personalized to the user & their audience.

Led a globally distributed design team to create an enterprise-quality, accessible, and trustworthy user experience across all product surfaces, including web (editor & browser extensions), desktop (Windows & Mac), and mobile (Android & iOS).

Supported senior & staff-level product designers, design system designers, design technologists, and accessibility specialists and guided their impact on the business in their respective program areas, including:

• Grammarly Design System

• Accessibility

• App actions

• Cross-platform user experiences on web, desktop & mobile

• Trust, privacy, security, identity

Also led the design team in the Mobile organization for the first year.

Rally re-balanced power dynamics between people and large technology companies by enabling researchers to study societal problems using web browsing data that users donate with consent.

• Established the research & design function. Developed talent acquisition strategy & operations for all cross-disciplinary roles. Shortened Mozilla’s typical time-to-hire from 6 to 2 months.

• Identified the product’s north star & early product scope through expert facilitation. Directed the discovery, design, and build of early product iterations in the market, including improving the team's learning quality.

• Launched pilot research studies with academic researchers, data scientists and journalists at Princeton & Stanford Universities and The Markup on issues like news consumption, misinformation, effects of online advertising, and data privacy.

• Reduced what Meta (Facebook), Google and other large technology companies track about its users across the internet. The Markup’s Pixel Hunt study found that 80% of the 5,400 users who donated their data to Rally encountered the Meta Pixel on websites they visited. Rally enabled The Markup to gain deep insights into Meta’s pervasive tracking infrastructure and write award winning investigative journalism. This joint effort led to multiple class action lawsuits & warnings from Congress and pressure on companies to change their practices.

• Facilitated skill-building discussions with cross-functional managers across Mozilla.

Nava partners with government agencies to make services simple, effective & accessible to all.

• Managed 7 product designers, researchers & content designers in a matrixed environment. Successfully delivered promotions, including into senior roles & people management.

• Partnered with design leadership to scale the design team from 6 to 40 people. Matured its culture, rituals and capabilities over 2 years. Built hiring infrastructure for new roles: content design & design management. Developed a framework for roles & responsibilities for designers and scaled it across all programs. Established a community of practice for design leads.

• Partnered with cross-functional leadership & executives to scale the company. Led trainings to prepare more people to step into team leadership and people management roles. Contributed to business development proposals that led to new contracts.

• Accountable for research & design on several enterprise & customer-facing products that served 200M people & brought in $50M in revenue. Partners include the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the States of Vermont & California. Teams ranged from a crisis response team of 6 people to a large cross-functional team of 40 people with multiple squads. Selected impact from the teams I led [below]: