Design career

My early career coincided with the dot com bubble and the inception of web design as a practice. In my early years, I worked across layout design, animation, interaction design, and information architecture, where my work received international recognition, such as Macromedia ‘Site of the Week’ (now Adobe), About.com ‘Outstanding Design’ & ‘Website of the Week’, and iBest ‘Top 10 Online and Interactive Agency in Spain’.

Following nearly ten years of progressing through design and user experience roles in an agency environment, I shifted to head up design at a social media start-up, responsible for all aspects of the consumer-facing experience, including user research, redefining the brand, layout, and design patterns for a Web 2.0 site.

With the effects of the recession and social media space consolidation, I sought more stability, accepting a green field role as the first user experience hire in Europe within the professional services arm of Enterprise workflow software provider Pegasystems. In a year I created demand with clients for UX services, spearheaded the recruitment of 2 additional designers to satisfy that demand, and was promoted to Lead. In the following three years, I headed design for a large digital transformation program at Lloyds Bank; drove product improvement for accessibility; led design strategy and implementation for Pega’s first consumer-facing mobile application; grew the team through demand-led growth by 200% with all team members exceeding a 70% utilization target.

Having established a UX practice I was promoted to Manager, reporting to the EMEA head of Professional Services. In the subsequent three years, I matured the UX team by implementing specialized design roles aligned to skillsets, with engagement strategies and responsibilities to better integrate digital customer experience within clients' agile projects and programs of work. Further increased team size by 217%, forming the most diverse team in the European arm of the company with nine different nationalities and a 40% female demographic. I maintained an 80% retention staff rate throughout my 3-year tenure while exceeding a utilization target of 70% across all team members. Furthermore, I established the highest profit margin in EMEA professional services for the UX Design role.

In 2017 I relocated to the United States as Director of Experience Design Consulting. Using data and stakeholder research highlighted that clients were finding value in design beyond in-app UX, successfully repositioning the team and offerings from solely being focused on the in-application user experience to overall Experience Design - changing the remit of existing designers, introducing a Service Design role, and rolling out training for design thinking and collaborative design methods across the consultancy organization.

Since 2020 I’ve been the Senior Director of Innovation Design at Pega with a remit to create a design culture throughout sales and customer success organizations.