I realized I much prefer a role as a designer over management, and lucky for me, there was a role open on Trello I was thrilled to get. I've since dipped into other Atlassian products, but continue to love being close to the craft and influencing product direction as an individual contributor in design.

• Design features within an Agile environment, partnering in a leadership triad of myself, product management, and engineering.

• Ensure alignment and consistency of my team’s designs across the work of other team’s designs and the existing product and product suite features.

• Run user research interviews and usability testing in partnership with our Research team.

• Help drive accessibility improvements, practices, and advocate for measurable accessibility goals within the product, as well as mentoring other designers across Atlassian on accessibility through a regular Mentorship Circle program and various workshops.

• Partnered with Design and Diversity and Inclusion leadership to draft a budget and proposal to start a new Accessibility department at Atlassian. Proposal and budget was approved by the company founders and product leadership team.

• Participated in interviewing and hiring Atlassian’s first Head of Accessibility.

• Created proposals and budgets for training, accessibility labs and equipment, and future hiring practices.

• Arranged multiple rounds of training, special guests, and speakers to improve Atlassian’s exposure and learning around accessibility.

• Led a cross-product and cross-discipline committee for improving accessibility.

• Connected with local accessibility communities and advocates, both in the Bay Area and in Australia, to start getting Atlassian involved in its surrounding accessibility communities.

• Directed and mentored a team of six UX designers.

• Coordinated the buyer experience design strategy with 12+ other teams, including brand, content, individual product marketing teams, customer advocates, growth, commerce, research, analysis, and experimentation.

• Advocated for inclusion of qualitative user data and research throughout our strategy and design process.

• Expanded the existing team, hiring 5 new designers.

• Collaborated with other designers on cross-Web property navigation strategy, the web pattern library, and buyer journey templates.

• Designed flows and responsive page layouts for various design projects.

• Ran usability testing on usertesting.com for our buyer experience and brand teams.

• Designed the user flows and experience models for mobile, tablet, and desktop interfaces, working in interdisciplinary teams.

• Wireframes, interactive prototypes, sketches, user flows, storyboards, and/or whatever communicated the ideas best.

• Scenario-based user testing, surveys, card sorts, heuristic evaluation, and accessibility audits.

• User experience track lead on two multi-million dollar contracts, for Vail and PG&E

• Brands included Vail, PG&E, Avnet, Lululemon, Target, Vision Service Provider (VSP), and Eddie Bauer.

Worked with a range of professional identities including real estate, private psychology practice, music, art, education, and non-profit.

Created professional Webs sites on the Wordpress blogging platform to allow the small business clients/owners of the sites to manage their own content and organization using the word-processor-like interface after project completion.

• I burned out on management and tech, especially after years of working full time while finishing school part time. I decided to "retire." I decided I didn't care about moving up the management ladder or making much money any more. I had never taken the time to seriously work on music, my first and primary love, and I wanted to try that, maybe some art too, and just live more fully outside of work.

• I got lucky and found a job as an administrative assistant at the U of MN in the magical Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, and Film Studies department. I was around many people much smarter and more culturally literate than me all day at work (and I'm not just talking about the PhD students and faculty). Outside of work I started an experimental electronic band with the ridiculously talented Makr and some other projects. I learned a lot.

• I then started Chinese Medicine school because acupuncture made a huge impact on life and I wanted to share it with more people. But then I got scared by the high loan debt I was quickly accumulating compared to the unstable income expected at the end. How badly did I want this? I felt a bit lost.

• I thought I'd try waiting tables - a perfect fit, I thought, for the late night hours and schedule demanded by people making music. I was embarrassingly, hilariously (though not at all funny then), bad at it. I wasn't used to my coworkers feeling let down by my work. It made me sad. I told myself everything has a learning curve. I kept at it for 6 months. I will always tip waitstaff more than 20%, and be forever forward grateful for a job that makes me feel competent, useful, and not have to go home with sore feet.

• I picked up freelance Web projects again to boost my income. I landed a contract gig at a design agency. I forgot how much I actually loved this work. I jumped back in with renewed excitement, gratitude, and perspective on what it means to be a digital designer.

ePortfolio & OSeP (Open Source ePortfolio)

• Managed and prioritized tasks for nine mostly telecommuting design and development team members.

• Regularly met with stakeholder board of representatives and user groups to collect, manage, and prioritize enhancements and bug fixes.

• Documented interface requirements.

• Team consistently met development and bug fixing milestones and deadlines on time with quality work.

• Designed for highly interactive and complex Enterprise-level Web products.

• Projects included an online portfolio and curriculum management system, an online graduation planner, updates to online registration, financial aid utilities, and grants management.

• Created and presented prototypes (paper, interactive HTML mockups, site maps, wireframes, etc.) and task flowcharts

• Front-end development using HTML, CSS, Javascript, JSP, ASP, VB, ODBC SQL, and XML.

• Collected usability feedback through user interviews, research, and usability evaluations.

• Worked with teammates to troubleshoot bugs and usability issues.

• Led 30+ academic units and organizations through user-centered design research and evaluation.

• Scenario-based evaluations, focus groups, one-on-one interviews of users, eye-tracking, field studies, heuristic evaluations, surveys, etc. Lightweight or heavy-weight, in our state-of-the-art lab, in conference rooms, in cubicles, or wherever it needed to be done.

• Developed an accessibility auditing protocol and designer training tutorials based on interviews and demos by assistive tech users. This protocol and training was also adopted by other local organizations and businesses including one of the top 5 discount retailers in the U.S.

• Co-led an accessible design full-day tutorial at the 2005 International Usability Professionals Association (UPA) conference in Montréal.

• Sat on the University of Minnesota Faculty Senate Committee on Disability Issues.

• Led organization through Web site re-design process.

• Implemented the site design, architecture, and back-end.

• Created a content management system that enforced design consistency and allowed staff to contribute content without coding.

• Reported Web server statistics and trends.