📝 Work Experience
Company: The Obama Foundation
Title: Lead User Researcher
Dates: 2022 — 2024
Description: I was a member of product leadership on the newly formed Obama Foundation product team. I was the head of user research, driving user research strategy, tooling, and process.
During my time there, I worked on the rebrand and relaunch of Obama.org, digital product strategy and visioning, content strategy, and audience segmentation.
Company: Khan Academy
Title: Staff User Researcher and Product Designer
Dates: 2016 — 2022
Role: I served on Khan Academy’s design leadership team as the representative for User Research and built the user research function’s processes, tooling, and relationships within the organization.
During my time there, I was part of the teams that launched new products like the NWEA Map Accelerator, teacher data dashboards to help them understand who needed help most in their classroom, teacher classroom features that allowed them to review content live in class, and student experiences that helped them navigate their independent study and homework more effectively.
Company: Fitbit
Title: User Researcher and Product Designer
Dates: 2013 — 2016
Role: I was Fitbit’s first user researcher, building a culture of UX research, tooling, and initial personas that would help take the organization from startup mode into a market leader in wearables.
I worked on a variety of projects including audience segmentation and persona development as we moved into higher end devices, mobile app exercise experiences including heart rate tracking, and on device UX for exercise experiences such as automatic exercise detection.
Company: GfK
Title: User Researcher and Product Designer
Dates: 2010-2013
Role: I was both a researcher and designer at GfK where our clients focused mostly on medical device manufacturers. I worked on a number of usability and FDA human factors validation tests for companies such as Abbott Labs, Philips Healthcare, Varian Medical Systems, and Nestle Healthcare. These projects spanned the US and the globe, with a number of them requiring coordination with teams in European and Asia.
Company: United States Peace Corps, The Gambia
Title: Teacher and Community Developer
Dates: 2006-2008
Role: I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in The Gambia, West Africa. Using a variety of ethnographic and participatory design techniques, I designed technology training programs that helped local youth gain valuable job skills in video and audio production, as well as computer literary.