At Workstream, we're helping hourly businesses hire, onboard, engage, and pay their employees in an increasingly complex labor market. As the first design leader, I built a team seven designers and a user researcher to help us grow our Hiring and Onboarding products and expand into an All-in-One engagement platform with a focus on worker engagement and retention.

To date, some of our highlights:

· Established our user research function (operations, insights library, training resources, and multi-level research)

· Established our first design system (process/governance, design/engg documentation and code repo)

· Redesigned our information architecture and global navigation

· Developed a concept car process used for sharing our product strategy and collecting feedback

· Launched a new mobile app supporting a new worker experience

· Designed AI features (chat to apply, voice to apply, job description optimizer) to improve application and time to hire success

· Developed a product marketing playbook and standards for engaging our users with education, guides and product promotions

· Launched new products critical to our company growth and customer success — I-9, e-verify, team records, document management, engagement surveys, chat, payroll, pto, shift scheduling, time and attendance, custom reporting, data export and custom fields, integrations (I9, eVerify, background checks)

As classroom tools were becoming more common, we wanted to find ways to connect the 100m+ teachers, students, parents and administrators using our products. As the new design leader I was tasked with building the first design and research team and partnering with the VP of Product to drive a new education community strategy.

The first initiative I took on was to redesign our mobile app which was out of date and had major usability issues. My team and I partnered with our district adoption team to conduct user research, worked with engineering team to understand constraints and opportunities, and conducted a mobile audit and analysis to create a design backlog. In redesigning the app, we introduced a new style guide and reduced the overall screen count by introducing native mobile patterns.

Each year we plan around a major back to school release. Over that time my team redesigned our core education tools — assignments, quizzes, grading, documents, and classroom management, introduced new features such as chat, class agendas, partner brand pages, partner integrations, community feed, and education resource sharing. This work not only grew our district adoption and user engagement but was an important business driver.

As businesses and schools were affected during COVID, we suddenly experienced a growth spike as distant learning became a necessity. Through our parent company, NetDragon, we entered into a partnership with the country of Egypt to deliver distance learning solutions for their entire country. Over four months my team worked to understand the needs of our international users and worked with our adoption and product teams to redesign or build new features to support 22+ million students and 1+ million teachers. This work coordinated in a successful nation-wide rollout of student testing across all grades.

Following on the success of it's new ads business, Facebook was exploring ways to generate new ads products. Lead generation (direct response advertising) was a leading candidate for innovation with advertisers limited to using Newsfeed display ads to drive traffic to their sites. The resulting lead generation experience for advertisers and users was slow, inconsistent, cumbersome and hard to manage. We saw an opportunity to create a native Lead Ads experience where advertisers could combine rich content with simple to use forms pre-filled with Facebook profile information.

As one of the original product designers, I led the design efforts for the Lead Ads tools which included a full suite of form creation and management tools, in-product CRM integration for SMBs and product experience integrations with Ads Manager, Power Editor and Business Manager. Working on very fast timelines, I conducted discovery calls with pilot customers and partnered with our user researchers and data science teams to continuously identify key problems and needs which informed our design priorities. In a little over a year we went from launching a simple pilot based on internal tools to an advanced suite of lead ad creation tools and an engaging ads experiences that generated $1b in business.

Our Consumer Experience Group was exploring ways to appeal younger generations who were taking more ownership of their financial lives. As a lead product designer for Mint, I collaborated with user research and product leadership to define the overall product strategy as well as leading design for key product initiatives.

In redesigning the Mint.com registration, onboarding and homepage experiences, we applied an experiment-driven approach to address user activation and engagement problems. I designed onboarding variations for adding bank accounts, a critical step to generate quick financial insights. I co-led a redesign of the homepage where we added financial content, revamped our financial offers and introduce a new coaching module to guide money management tasks.

In partnership with Amex, I led the design direction for a money management mobile app to support the underbanked. I conducted surveys and interviews to understand how younger generations thought about and approached financial topics which I developed into product storyboards and concept designs. The project ended up being canceled due to a shift in our strategy.

As part of our growth strategy, we launched a new set of Credit Score products for web and mobile. I led the overall design for our web product, designing a dynamic education feature that helped users understand and manage their score. The successful launch of these products and the new engagement helped drive the growth of our credit monitoring and financial offers businesses.