How I lead

Leading practice

At Empower I was promoted from Senior to Lead Designer for design leadership and enterprise AI adoption. I mentored designers and ran design critique, with the aim of a team that settles arguments with evidence instead of opinion. When I built AI-assisted methods for regulated product work, leadership asked me to show how I was working. I demonstrated it, then volunteered more sessions on research synthesis, UX specifications, design system migration, and engineering handoff. Parts of it were picked up by teammates while the organization was still forming its own approach.

Leading programs

At CIGNA I owned phase one readiness for CODE Runner, a multiyear program that changed how 300+ clinical operations staff did their jobs. That meant coordinating technology, content, QA, staging, vendors, and business operations, and telling senior management the truth about risk while there was still time to act on it. Phase one hit its scope, and the work earned the CIGNA Quarterly Champion Award.

At Prudential I led responsive web and WCAG accessibility programs across enterprise platforms, and made the case for human-centered design through stakeholder training and advocacy across business units.

Setting standards that travel

The best leverage I have found is building things other people can reuse. The multiple-account component behind the NewYork-Presbyterian redesign was built to flex across plan counts, blackout windows, and transfer types, and it went on to serve other client sites. Accessible patterns work the same way. Fix them once at the pattern level and every team that uses them inherits the fix.

What I am looking for next

I want to be precise about this, because it is easy to overstate. I have led practice rather than headcount. I mentored designers, ran critique, led programs, and moved new methods through a team by persuasion. Day-to-day guidance of a team is the next step, and it is the part of a leadership role I want most.