Aug. 2014—Present
Distributed / Remote
Automattic, Inc.
Senior Product Designer & Project Lead
Jul 2020 — Present
As Senior Product Designer, I’ve focused on elevating the quality user experience across many of Automattic’s brand pillars, such as WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, & more. I’ve also dedicated significant time towards design mentorship, teaching designer growth programs, and design hiring.
Highlights include:
- Research: Leading UX research sessions, live usability tests with customers, & assumption mapping exercises with internal team members to help refine our problem statements into projects that can easily be scoped and executed.
- Product: Creating a vision for products & features, scoping & prioritizing those into smaller incremental projects, and leading them to completion with large multi-disciplinary teams that include engineering, marketing, and business units.
- Hiring: Assisting our DesignEx team run trials for design candidates. This includes reviewing design work, giving feedback, & recommending said designer as a new hire.
- Mentorship: Design mentorships for other designers within Automattic. Helping them refine their career goals & skillsets.
- Education: Leading Design Dens on Product & Growth Design to help designers further expand their toolset & business mindset. This includes quantitative & qualitative analysis and tutorials to execute roadmaps with full teams.
- Alignment: Bringing engineering, marketing, product, & business units together to break down large problems into incremental improvements across the entire user experience—from marketing to product. I frequently work cross-divisionally to keep Automattic products aligned.
- Design Systems: Maintaining and evolving multi-layer design systems that stem from WordPress Core (open source software), and cascade down to many Automattic products, which also implement different design systems themselves.
- UX & UI: Creating end-to-end design concepts based on all of the above. From sketches & flow maps, to polished UI designs and interactive prototypes. Working with engineers to ensure pixel perfect work is shipped for every user, on every device.
Product Designer
Jun 2017 — Jul 2020
As a dedicated product designer, I shifted my focus toward improving high level user experience within several Automattic products, including Jetpack and WordPress.com. I worked extensively in all phases of design—from early stage UX to to implementation and optimization, always keeping focus on customer needs.
Some highlights include UX research, data analysis & reporting, leading large collaborative projects between design, development, marketing, product, and leading asynchronous design sprints with other designers across many time zones, and of course plenty of UI design.
During this time, I began running monthly acquisition & churn reporting for multiple products to help identify weak points in product UX and marketing. This directly contributed shape the product roadmap and find a better product market fit for Jetpack.
Design Engineer
Aug 2014 — Jul 2017
As a Design Engineer I focused on brand & marketing design, along with product design and front-end engineering across several products under the Automattic umbrella.
Some highlighted work includes a redesign and rebuild of Jetpack.com, UX/UI improvements throughout the WordPress.com platform, creating digital and physical promotional designs for Jetpack & WordPress.com, speaking at events on behalf of Automattic, and acting as creative director for design contractors.
During this time, I helped lay the foundation that took Jetpack from a simple & free WordPress plugin to a more robust premium plugin loved by millions of customers.
Feb. 2014—Aug.2014
Distributed / Remote
Parka, LLC. (Acquired by Automattic)
BruteProtect
Lead designer & front-end developer. Created and maintained brand guidelines, marketing & web design, product UI design, and more. I had a primary focus on our flagship product BruteProtect, where I designed and developed much of the front-end of our web app and WordPress plugin. I also designed and built BruteProtect.com.
Parka, llc / BruteProtect were acquired by Automattic in August 2014.
May 2012—Feb. 2014
Providence, Rhode Island
Astonish (Acquired by Zywave)
Lead designer & front-end developer. While at Astonish, I managed design & front-end development of enterprise clients. I worked with our web team to create and maintain a custom WordPress theme framework, plugins, and multitude of custom WordPress child themes for our 450+ active clients.
I also helped to create an internal design system, and marketing materials.
Astonish rebranded to Intygral and was acquired by Zywave in 2015
Sept. 2009—May 2012
New Bedford, Massachusetts
Slocum Design Studio
Senior designer & front-end developer who specialized in print design, package design, and web interface design. Often worked on designing & building custom WordPress theme for hundreds of small & medium sized businesses throughout the United States.
After joining the team, I spearheaded the effort to rebrand Slocum Design Studio. The rebrand included a new identity, website, business cards, letterhead, envelopes, and an entire suite of marketing materials.
Oct. 2008—May 2012
Providence, Rhode Island
Schwadesign (Defunct)
Junior designer & front-end developer who specialized in web design, marketing design, and branding design for dozens of mid-size clients around the United States. Built custom WordPress & Drupal themes.
Jan. 2004—Aug. 2014
New Bedford, Massachusetts
Midnight Shift Studio (Defunct)
I ran my own full service design studio for just over 10 years, working with over 300 small and mid-size clients from around the United States and Canada. Depending on the type of client needs and project size I would often assemble small agile teams of contractors to help complete certain tasks such as PR and back-end development.
Jan. 2004—Aug. 2014
Remote
BayNet Web Services
Web designer & front-end developer who designed and built several hundred small business websites throughout the United States. Occasionally created brand & marketing design packages.