Case studies from my 15 years in design
A Glow-up for Yelp Design
Head of Consumer Design | 30+ reports | 2019 - 2022 | Consumer Product
When you think Yelp you probably don’t think of great design. I certainly didn’t when I took over the majority of the Yelp design team in 2019. It was a group of 10 underperforming designers that struggled to impact the product.
Three years later I grew the team into a high-impact team of 30 that totally transformed the Consumer experience on Yelp - we did a redesign, built a design system, created ops, defined a company vision, and spearheaded key product initiatives.
This is the story of what I did to make this happen.
Helping AI engineers improve their product quality
Founding Designer | 2023 | AI | B2B startup
AI is everywhere - but the quality still mostly sucks. The nature of prompt engineering makes it is incredibly difficult to know whether you are making your product better or worse - especially at scale. I joined two friends who were trying to solve this problem by creating better tooling for AI engineers to monitor, experiment and improve their prompts.
Currently under active funding conversations, please reach out if you want access to the case study
Re-inventing Yelp Home Services
Head of Services Design | 12 reports | 2020 - 2022 | Marketplace Product
I inherited Yelp’s newest and highest impact area in 2020. Using design thinking methodologies, I identified a suite of quick wins and established trust. Then, when growth slowed down, I spearheaded a transformative new initiative that launched one of our top features of 2022.
Other projects
Google
Product Management
Google is the first place people turn when dreaming, planning and experiencing a trip — I was responsible for making sure searches like “things to do in paris” or “vietnam travel” helped millions of travellers.
I was also responsible for the “day plans” feature which used AI and machine learning to identify where travellers went in order to surface useful day-by-day itineraries.
PR: Introducing Destintations on Google
FastCo: Google Destinations - Innovation by Design 2016
Search Engine Journal: Trip Planning Comes to Google Maps
Lonely Planet
Design Manager
Lonely Planet is one of the world’s most beloved travel brands. I helped the 50 year-old book publisher move into the internet era by leading the Creative and Product Development teams during an international aquisition.
During this time I developed websites and apps in partnership with major travel agencies, led our largest brand campaigns and launched new products — for example, an in-flight travel app utilised by airline partners.
Yelp Cookbook
Design Manager
My first role at Yelp was making the case for a redesign and building our first Design System called the “Cookbook”.
My systems team grew into our first Design Ops org as I built out the Content Writing and Program Management disciplines to address the expanding needs of our growing company.