I mapped Product Management and Engineering points of contact across the enterprise platform to identify existing touchpoints and relationship gaps.

I outlined the current state of stakeholder connections and the ideal state. I worked with the UX leaders to determine who should meet with whom, based on our leadership pillars: Manager, Team Lead, and Architect.

Each UX leader conducted the designated stakeholder meetings on a regular cadence and recorded notes with Gemini. I ran all notes through Gemini to pull out strategic themes from each conversation.

I curated a collection of strategic themes and ran it through Gemini to surface patterns and recurring topics across the 40+ conversations.

I partnered with UX Research to pull existing customer data on the identified topics. I then worked with stakeholders to narrow down the list to the top 3 topics.

Designers were assigned to those top areas, driving maximum business impact and building trust with our stakeholders — their strategic insights led to UX action.

I led an effort with UX leaders to define and document our UX design process. The process outlined how designers approach their work, from prioritization to implementation.

To ensure the design process was built by and for the design team, I ran a design process pilot. Designers followed the process in their everyday work and shared feedback to inform iterations. Gradual, consistent communication of the process enabled smooth adoption across the team.

I partnered with my manager to deliver a team presentation about our planned adoption of agile. This introduced upcoming agile ceremonies and Jira expectations, along with the benefits of agile. Designers gained insight into not only what agile is, but also why it benefits them.

I created team resources about key agile concepts and Jira requirements so designers could get familiar with agile design leading up to our adoption. I released a series of Slack announcements to build anticipation for sprint planning, and I circulated the materials across other UX groups to establish consistency in our UX Design department's agile onboarding approach.

Day 1 of agile kicked off with sprint planning. Working out of a Jira backlog and sprint board, I led each designer to identify which stories they could prioritize in a 3-week window. Over time, regular agile ceremonies and sprint reports uncovered ideal story point and carryover baselines so designers were equipped to determine their workload balance and plan capacity with their partnering product managers and engineers.

I met with other managers across the UX Design department to help them with their agile roll-outs. My onboarding materials were used to create a Cursor rule for the entire UX Design department, enabling all design teams to adopt agile with my approach.

After a few sprints passed, I paid attention to the gaps in our agile alignment and where AI automation in the form of Cursor skills could help the team mature in our practice.

To pinpoint exactly what we needed from the Cursor skills, I defined the current state and where I wanted to help the team improve. Specifically, I saw opportunity for us to mature in the following agile areas:

• Reducing carryover (stories carrying over sprint to sprint) for more accurate and predictable delivery estimates
• Improving Jira hygiene for more accurate metrics around workload, resourcing, and product impact
• Reducing stale backlog issues for better visibility into potential priorities

Now that I had the areas defined, I knew exactly what I wanted each Cursor skill to do.

Designers were forgetting to close their Jira stories at the end of each sprint. As a result, stories were either unnecessarily carried over into the next sprint, or we spent time reviewing these stories and closing them as a team during sprint planning. This cut into valuable planning and discussion time.

Cursor skill

• Using the Slack and Atlassian MCPs, I created a skill to identify all open Jira stories 1 day before sprint close.
• A Slack message was sent to each assignee of the open stories, along with links to the stories for quick access.
• The automated Slack message reminded recipients that the sprint was about to close. It explained that all completed stories needed to be closed and that stories still in progress could be left open. However, if stories were going to remain open and carry over into the next sprint, then this needed to be discussed at sprint planning.

79% → 97%

Sprint closeout increase

Several Jira stories and epics were slipping through the cracks when it came to Jira hygiene, such as proper labeling, status updates, and scoping. However, due to the volume of Jira issues, manual monitoring wasn't feasible.

Cursor skill

• Using the Google and Atlassian MCPs in Cursor, I created a skill to audit all Jira stories (and associated epics) in each sprint after sprint close.
• The Cursor skill evaluated each Jira issue's hygiene compliance and published the audit to a Google Document.
• I used the hygiene findings to pinpoint where the hygiene gaps were and provide more targeted coaching to the team.

30% → 85%

Hygiene alignment increase

After years without a shared agile practice to manage the team's work, I noticed that there were hundreds of issues sitting in our backlog. Many of them were several years old and obsolete. This created a cluttered backlog, making it harder for researchers and designers to identify relevant work that needed refinement as they determined prioritization with their product groups.

Cursor skill

• Using the Google and Atlassian MCPs in Cursor, I created a skill to audit the entire backlog and publish the results to a Google Sheet.
• The audit spreadsheet provided a high-level overview of everything in the backlog, organized by product area, creation date, sprint assignment, and more.
• Cursor closed all stories older than 90 days and all epics older than 200 days that didn't have any open stories.
• After the initial clean sweep, I set up automation rules in Jira to regularly monitor the backlog and close stale issues.

> 80

Stale issues closed

I created generic versions of each skill and published them to a shared repo used by 130+ people in the UX Design department. This enabled other leaders to adopt my skills into their own agile workflows.

I shared specific AI goals for designers to work towards, broken down to achievable quarterly milestones. This positioned them to adopt AI in meaningful ways and build proficiency with various tools.

I made AI adoption a team sport, something everyone could get excited about. I connected designers who could help each other upskill, and I identified opportunities for designers to present their AI work and gain visibility for their contributions.

I kept Product Management and Engineering stakeholders informed of our evolving AI-driven design practice and regularly collected feedback. They appreciated the increased design delivery speed and the ability to see their ideas rapidly incorporated into prototypes. I also partnered with Engineering to get designers contributing to product codebases. This was a win-win: Designers took their AI prototypes further, and engineers spent less time fixing bugs and more time on complex implementation work.

As a manager, I held myself to the same AI usage expectations set for my designers:

• I embraced AI-enabled rapid prototyping myself, creating designs with Cursor, Claude, and Figma Make. This way, I could provide guidance rooted in first-hand experience.
• I partnered with design teams across the department to release a unified set of AI principles and policies. This created cross-team alignment in our AI approach.
• I created Cursor skills to automate workflows and adopted LLMs into my everyday operations. I shared my approaches with the broader design department so others could increase their efficiency with AI.

As a manager who newly entered the product space after the reorganization, I talked with all team members to develop an understanding of existing roles.

Through several exploratory conversations and my own observations, I identified what was working well in terms of responsibilities and where overlap or ambiguity existed.

I partnered with the UX leaders to document the team structure. This included clearly defined team functions, groups, and focus areas.

After the team structure document was created, I led the development of a RACI model with the UX leaders. This granular model put our team structure document into context, defining specific tasks and the level of involvement for each role across those tasks.

To communicate the team structure and roles/responsibilities, I delivered a presentation with my manager at a team all-hands. This gave everyone the opportunity to dive deeper into the new structure's nuances and ask questions.

I extended this effort to other UX groups within the UX Design department, enabling several managers to create team structure documents and RACI models for their respective teams. This positioned the entire department to establish the same level of role clarity for their teams that I did for mine.

I observed a strict divide between visual and interaction designers, which wasn't conducive to the success of the business or the people. After all, product designers should be — and often are — skilled in both disciplines.

I also observed an opportunity to freshen up the visual experience of both the design system and the product portfolio. This opportunity became more salient when I conducted a lightweight competitive analysis to look at design systems across similar enterprise companies.

I wanted my direct reports to have a voice in team direction. I spoke with each of them and listened intently to what they had to say about their role and the team's function. All of them were very enthusiastic about the opportunity to support the design system full time. They also didn't even like the title "visual designer," feeling it undersold their multifaceted design abilities.

I also ensured I had full support from my manager as well as the UX front-end development team that was currently running the design system. Those impactful, highly skilled front-end developers had been dealing with the impact of limited design resourcing for a while, relying on product designers to volunteer their time on rare occasions when bandwidth allowed.

To make a business case for repositioning the visual design team, I needed convincing data. Specifically, I wanted to uncover how the design system's lack of design resourcing impacted products and customers. I spoke with numerous product management stakeholders who worked on the most business-critical areas of the enterprise product portfolio. I also partnered with UX researchers to uncover any existing customer insights around the look, feel, and function of the products.

The insights I collected supported my initial observations around design system opportunities. There was an appetite for a refreshed, cutting-edge visual experience, especially from Product Management — this was flagged as essential to keep our products competitive in the market. Both internal stakeholders and customers had a strong appetite for animation and important accessibility features such as dark theme. Dark theme surfaced as a consistent request in customer data, as our user base was largely engineering professionals.

In addition to Product Management collaboration, I worked with the design system's front-end development team to ensure that engineering leaders across the portfolio were willing to support the technical lift required to adopt an eventual major visual release.

I used my collected data and insights to develop a business case for senior-level leaders. I made two proposals in my business case presentation:

• Transform the visual design team into our first design team dedicated to the design system.
• Hire additional designers to round out the design system team.

While I didn't get the headcount (at first), I did get the green light to officially launch the company's first design team for the design system.

In a little over a year, I led my designers to land a major visual release, in partnership with the design system's front-end development team. This major visual release introduced dark theme, motion design, and a refreshed visual brand identity for the products.

After demonstrating the business impact of the team, I secured additional design headcount to expand the team and ensure the continued evolution of the design system — and the entire enterprise product portfolio.

Working professionals with limited free time.

Housekeeping duties take up what limited free time these busy working professionals have. However, finding a housekeeper aligned with their cleaning needs and schedules is difficult and time consuming.

Provide an easy, intuitive way to find housekeepers on demand who can provide the specific services when and how the user needs them.

Give complete transparency into pricing and commitment before the booking process begins. Setting expectations early with the user ensures they truly want to proceed with the process.

Sharing personal information requires trust. Let the user interact with the product and hold off on account creation until they're ready to book.

Make the user feel like the product knows them. Show a general home page for new users and a personalized home page for existing users.

Accessibility goes beyond color contrast and clear communication. Make mobile app buttons thumb-friendly as well as accessible for those without the use of their hands.