Product Design Manager at Cvent
2014-2018 - Portland, Oregon
Overview
Conferences have been essential to my own career growth - ie I found a job in New Zealand at the Game Developers Conference! Cvent (3,000+ employees) creates technology for empowering these events and human connections. I was the Product Design Manager of a leading UX team at Cvent, on the CrowdCompass product. I led design vision, process, workshops, user research and analysis, and coaching of my team.
Product
My team oversaw CrowdCompass - the highly customizable mobile app for event planners and attendees. It became the #1 best-selling iOS & Android B2B solution for conferences with millions of users and 30%-45% annual growth rates.
Event planners use our app-building software to customize and create their own mobile app suited to their conference's unique priorities, branding, social and privacy needs.
Users
The event planner has the stressful job of bringing together thousands of people to achieve their goals. They deal with everything from coordinating with stakeholders, speakers, exhibitors, sponsors, vendor staff, and volunteers, to managing budget, ordering catering, and juggling hundreds of tasks/fires at once.
Conferences have been essential to my own career growth - ie I found a job in New Zealand at the Game Developers Conference! Cvent (3,000+ employees) creates technology for empowering these events and human connections. I was the Product Design Manager of a leading UX team at Cvent, on the CrowdCompass product. I led design vision, process, workshops, user research and analysis, and coaching of my team.
Product
My team oversaw CrowdCompass - the highly customizable mobile app for event planners and attendees. It became the #1 best-selling iOS & Android B2B solution for conferences with millions of users and 30%-45% annual growth rates.
Event planners use our app-building software to customize and create their own mobile app suited to their conference's unique priorities, branding, social and privacy needs.
Users
The event planner has the stressful job of bringing together thousands of people to achieve their goals. They deal with everything from coordinating with stakeholders, speakers, exhibitors, sponsors, vendor staff, and volunteers, to managing budget, ordering catering, and juggling hundreds of tasks/fires at once.
Beyond a "Visual Refresh"
I joined Cvent when discussions of a "visual refresh" were happening. While I supported visual improvements, I advocated for improving user experience as well - including onboarding, ease of use, page hierarchy, and IA. I led our team of UX Designers and UI-Visual Designer to achieve success - providing direction, coaching, stakeholder communication, workshops, and user research. Our work provided the vision of product and priority of work for the next few years. Later we tackled redesigning login and the wayfinding within the app.
Global Leadership
While my product's UX team was appropriately staffed, we identified a gap in UX across Cvent as a whole. There was little consistency in the dozens of siloed products. I was a founding member of the global UX leadership team. We managed extremely fast growth in the UX department - defining job titles/descriptions, career paths, corporate UX strategies, design patterns, style guides, and operations.
I joined Cvent when discussions of a "visual refresh" were happening. While I supported visual improvements, I advocated for improving user experience as well - including onboarding, ease of use, page hierarchy, and IA. I led our team of UX Designers and UI-Visual Designer to achieve success - providing direction, coaching, stakeholder communication, workshops, and user research. Our work provided the vision of product and priority of work for the next few years. Later we tackled redesigning login and the wayfinding within the app.
Global Leadership
While my product's UX team was appropriately staffed, we identified a gap in UX across Cvent as a whole. There was little consistency in the dozens of siloed products. I was a founding member of the global UX leadership team. We managed extremely fast growth in the UX department - defining job titles/descriptions, career paths, corporate UX strategies, design patterns, style guides, and operations.
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Collaboration
I conducted many design thinking workshops at Cvent. I enjoy getting people together to collaborate. People got energized, creative, and smarter about the problems we were solving. Workshops included user journey mapping, sketch sessions, empathy mapping, and storyboarding. I also co-organized a Design Sprint for a product redesign.
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Design Strategy
I directed our team through creating style guides, design patterns, personas, mental models, and user journey maps. These artifacts were used to communicate vision to stakeholders and align sprint teams. They gave Product Managers a high-level view of our product and our real life users.
I directed our team through creating style guides, design patterns, personas, mental models, and user journey maps. These artifacts were used to communicate vision to stakeholders and align sprint teams. They gave Product Managers a high-level view of our product and our real life users.
Analytics
I truly enjoy diving into metrics and defining success. For Cvent, data lived in many places so I used mixpanel, tableau, sql database queries, python scripts and excel.
I leveraged customer feedback in Salesforce and user interviews, which I tagged/coded into word clouds and graphs.
I truly enjoy diving into metrics and defining success. For Cvent, data lived in many places so I used mixpanel, tableau, sql database queries, python scripts and excel.
I leveraged customer feedback in Salesforce and user interviews, which I tagged/coded into word clouds and graphs.
Manager
I directly managed 3-5 people on the CrowdCompass UX team. I was responsible for the vision of our product, resourcing, UX process, hiring, performance reviews, stakeholder presentations, and Portland office leadership. I loved mentoring my reports - helping one move from Quality Assurance into Product Design and another transition from Marketing Graphic Design to UI Design to Product Design. I created UX training sessions and guides for user research, personas, maps, and workshops. I fostered a 'learn-while-doing' mentality - searching for new opportunities to align my IC's interests and coaching them throughout the project. This upskilling allowed me to improve morale, negotiate competitive salary rates, secure promotions and strengthen our product.
I directly managed 3-5 people on the CrowdCompass UX team. I was responsible for the vision of our product, resourcing, UX process, hiring, performance reviews, stakeholder presentations, and Portland office leadership. I loved mentoring my reports - helping one move from Quality Assurance into Product Design and another transition from Marketing Graphic Design to UI Design to Product Design. I created UX training sessions and guides for user research, personas, maps, and workshops. I fostered a 'learn-while-doing' mentality - searching for new opportunities to align my IC's interests and coaching them throughout the project. This upskilling allowed me to improve morale, negotiate competitive salary rates, secure promotions and strengthen our product.
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Cross-Product
Our CrowdCompass product connected to many other products in our enterprise suite. This was a key competitive advantage, but also a huge challenge for UX. Products didn't talk to each other, they looked different, they didn't all have UX resources, and each had their own priorities. They are also always changing - new offerings with potential for overlap, redesigns with new design patterns, and acquisitions to fold in. This meant I put a lot of energy into growing the UX department as a whole. We needed UX partners in all products but resources were thin. We increased hiring and communication, provided design consistency, and found opportunities for innovation. While I was at Cvent, we went from having UX managers to one director to several directors. |
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One of my reports and I were the company's leading experts on Accessibility WCAG 2.0 requirements and I led a cross-disciplinary team to investigate and implement these requirements. We researched mobile iOS and Android accessibility extensively, as the guidelines are less clear on these platforms. I contacted local organization for the blind and conducted multiple user testing sessions with visually impaired participants.