I spent most of my early career as a researcher on an island within a larger org. At Honeywell and then Facebook, there were other researchers - but not in my world. I was embedded in teams that were moving fast, trusted to figure it out, and largely left to do so alone. It was the heyday of UX investment. Lots of funding, genuine belief in the work, but not much direction - especially for research.

I was doing the work. It felt scattered. I had intent without focus, effort without a clear outcome. What I was missing wasn't method or rigor. It was the discipline to ask, before starting anything, what decision this work was actually trying to influence, and whether the people who needed to act on it were ready to. I didn't have anyone helping me point the plane. I was too busy flying it.

At the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative I built my first research team. For the first time I wasn't alone in the work - and that changed how I thought about it. But it was at ServiceNow that everything crystalized, managing a team of researchers spread across different domains, most of them working alone, all of them accountable for whether their work actually moved product decisions.

A colleague said something during that period that I've never forgotten: if stakeholders can't say what they'd do with the results, we have no business doing it. That line reoriented how I led my team, how I thought about research prioritization, and eventually what I decided to do with everything I'd learned.

I left tech in 2025 to build a real estate business with my husband - a deliberate move toward work that felt more aligned, more autonomous, and closer to the kind of direct impact I'd spent years trying to create in large organizations. I continue to work with researchers because it's the work I keep coming back to. Not as a manager, not as a consultant, but as a thought partner for people navigating exactly what I navigated - often without enough support, in a moment that requires more clarity than most people prepared them for.

The stuff my mom would want me to include:

I'm a certified coach through the Co-Active Training Institute. I hold a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Texas Tech University and have taught interaction and UX design at the University of Minnesota and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.