(If you made it this far, it means you care not just about the "what", but about the "who". I like you already)
My love for design began with a love for architecture, after my dad took me to walk through a new crop of model homes in the Bay Area, where I grew up. At the conclusion of the tour, the agent handed us a folio containing the floor plans of all the models we’d seen. I was obsessed. Just like that, a 30-minute visit turned into a lifelong fixation on how homes are designed for people. In hindsight, my obsession with architecture wasn’t just about buildings – it was an appreciation for design being applied to improve the human experience.
From there, my expansive and circuitous evolution into a designer began. Physical product design and robotics classes in high school. Teaching myself Photoshop on the library computers. Getting my first graphic design job in college. I even ran a mini fridge delivery company at one point, but we won't get into that. Then, a Facebook internship that kicked off my tech career. In my 8.5 total years at Meta, I touched just about every part of the product lifecycle:
Technical content writer: crafting FAQs for the Facebook Help Center
Product specialist: deeply understanding launched products, monitoring performance and user feedback, and working with engineers to ship impactful improvements
Product marketing manager: full marketing funnel from brainstorm output to global launch moments
Since then, I’ve found a home in product design, my favorite part of the product lifecycle yet. Design is more than a vocation to me – it’s a way of expressing love. How meaningful is it to take the time to deeply understand someone’s needs, and apply every bit of your creative and logical brain to improve their situation or help them reach a goal? How often has the beauty of an intentionally-designed space had the power to change your sense of optimism about the world? As designers, we get the privilege of making people’s lives better.
My journey within product design has been about as varied as my journey to it. I’ve helped turn moonshot ideas into crisp visions that leadership can get behind; inherited projects from other designers and adapted them to fit new research or constraints; tinkered away on an unglamorous corner of a product to move a meaningful metric…and dutifully knocked out daunting lists of quality improvements that won’t move a single metric at all. As a designer, I value being able to plug in anywhere and make an impact.
Beyond design, I’m an artist. I spend my free time journaling, producing music, creative writing (currently working on my first novel), reading, making digital art, capturing the world around me on my iPhone, sewing, playing sports…the list goes on. If you really want to get me talking, ask me about the interactive narrative game I’m building using Figma prototyping (manually!...no shade to AI).