employment
SENIOR STAFF User research Manager
2022-Present
I spearhead strategic UX research for 7 product areas. My team presents reserach findings to the Executive Teams to Influencing company-wide roadmap decisions to improved product adoption.
We grew the UX Research team from 3 to 7 researchers by demonstrating the strategic impact of customer centricity.
Our team empowers 120+ product managers and designers to regularly engage with customers through scalable self-serve research programs.
User researcher
2021-2022
Leading mixed-method new user experience research about small business financial technologies.
Brought data-backed insights to redesign QuickBooks.com, increasing monthly traffic to 19M visits.
Illuminated the mental models around new businesses, opening up a new trial product experience for QuickBooks.
Human factors researcher
2021
Led hardware and usability research about autonomous vehicle systems for engineering and design teams.
Marketing Researcher
2020-2021
Led research about financial technology product messaging, pricing, and positioning for Product, PMM, and GTM teams.
Design thinking program manager
2020-2022
Transforming user research into growth expansion strategies for new online design thinking courses.
Gathering insights about the impacts of design thinking through interviews with C-suite customers and compiling the findings into technical and marketing articles.
Improving the reach and impact of content and marketing campaigns through UI surveys and analytics deep dive.
Product Marketing Manager
2019
Turned global market research into impactful integrated marketing campaigns for 3D mapping software.
Captured customer use cases and product improvement needs through interviews, usability tests, and surveys resulting in new content for technical blogs, instructional videos, and news articles.
Made B2B SaaS marketing decisions data-driven through building quantitative dashboards to track, analyze, and communicate spend-to-conversion metrics at weekly team meetings.
Spearheaded expansion of military UAS mapping technologies into commercial sectors through global market analysis and customer need-finding.
Launched integrated marketing campaigns to share B2B SaaS 3D mapping technology based on a deep dive into customer use cases.
Created new capabilities to turn aerial surveys into 3D maps through managing a cross-functional team. (This required me to fly in a Cessna in turbulent weather processing images on a laptop while trying not to get sick.)
Executive Director / Research Associate -
Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative (SURI)
2018-2019
Led human-technology interaction research projects and external partnerships to increase community resilience.
Researched how technology (e.g., UAS, social media, risk software, emergency systems) impacts end-user and stakeholder decision making by managing international corporate, government, academic research partnerships.
Grew external funding for the research projects through organizing six international workshops (up to 120 attendees), winning grants, and negotiating corporate donations.
Research Scientist -
DHS Center of Excellence: VACCINE
2017-2018
Responsible for a team of five computer engineers in launching new software products to first responders, emergency managers, and the agricultural industry.
Piloted geospatial software scalability research through leading field visits, ethnographic surveys, and usability tests with the emergency response sector.
Reduced customer onboarding time by developing a support workflow to ingest user feedback and turn it into training documentation, webinars, and tutorials. Resulted in deploying social media geospatial visualization software in several weeks (rather than several months) to the entire US Coast Guard for search and rescue ahead of the 2017 hurricane season.
Successfully secured multi-million dollar external research funding by winning five competitive grants.
Research Scientist -
Civil Engineering and Built Environment
2015-2017
Developed data-driven decision tools to support investments in rural communities.
Presented policies for rural Australia by collecting data (economic, transportation, and demographic statistics) and analyzing with firsthand interviews to model the impact of technology and infrastructure investments.
Guided aviation infrastructure investments in Eastern China by leading market research and analysis for the Chinese government aerospace sector.
Recommended growth expansion strategies for emergency software technology through leading field studies to Indonesia and rural Australia.
Human Factors Research/Teaching Assistant -
Industrial Engineering
2009-2015
Led research projects to capture the human impacts of infrastructure and technological investments. Successfully secured external funding to conduct user research and be embedded in Japan (2-years) and Thailand (6-months) to ensure international applicability.
Optimized air transportation policies by collecting and analyzing socio-economic data with interviews, field visits, and a self-designed national survey to identify communities most at need for air service. Resulted in an award-winning FAA policy that suggested a $2.5M/year savings to the FAA while serving 47k more passengers.
Developed foundational user research concepts about situation awareness by designing and leading human-in-the-loop flight simulation testing for NASA/FAA research projects.
Taught human factors engineering course Workplace Design and Analysis.
EDUCATION
Purdue University, PhD - 2015
Industrial Engineering
Foci - Human factors, decision systems, HCI, transportation
Cal Poly, SLO, BS - 2008
Mechanical Engineering