About
Results-driven product design manager with over a decade of experience leading and mentoring design teams across fintech and merchant services, using AI-assisted tools to accelerate craft without losing rigor.
How I lead
Design the team around the business, not the backlog.
I organize designers around business pillars — not evenly split tickets — so every priority has a named, end-to-end owner instead of a queue.
Give the system an owner.
Shared services and design systems are force multipliers, not part-time work. They get a dedicated owner, or they get starved by everything else on the roadmap.
Tie every ask to a goal.
When priorities compete, I anchor the conversation to a specific revenue or delivery target instead of litigating whose work matters more.
Lead the way I live.
With empathy, and room for people to be authentically themselves — that's where I've seen teams do their most creative, highest-performing work.
Experience
Senior Product Design Manager · Global Payments
March 2020 – Present- Hired, mentored, and grew a design team of 8 owning account portals, boarding, and value-added services for a 163K+ monthly user base worldwide.
- Led the cross-functional effort that grew design system adoption from 5 to 17 products.
- Streamlined design-to-dev hand-off with Figma Make, cutting hand-off time by a full sprint cycle.
- Brought Figma dev hand-offs and UAT testing to WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
UI/UX Product Designer · Heartland Payment Systems
August 2015 – March 2020- Designed e-commerce experiences within an established design system, partnering with engineering on interaction design and regional accessibility standards.
- Used Pendo to track and lift Customer Effort Scores by 1+ point out of 5 across 8 task flows.
Education
B.S. Anthropology
College of Charleston · 2009 – 2013
Digital Media Certificate
Trident Technical College · 2013
Skills
Industry knowledge
Product design, UI, UX, Interaction design, Inclusive design, Workshop facilitation, Rapid prototyping, Design research, Mentorship
Tools
Figma Design, FigJam, Figma Make, Pendo, Miro, Jira, Confluence
Other
HTML, CSS, Agile, AI-assisted design tools
Outside of work, I spend my time crafting, watching sports, and identifying the insects in my native plant garden — I stay curious by nature. I lead the way I live: with empathy, and room for people to be themselves.