Louisiana State University

Bard College

Design Manager at Substack

I support a wonderful team responsible for product design, brand design, and user research across Substack’s rapidly growing platform, all of whom are more talented that I ever was. TBH I’m more like the Tail of Design: just trying to wag rather than wig.

Substack

Head Of Design

Substack makes it simple for writers and other creators to earn money and build loyal, engaged audiences. I lead a team of amazing product and brand designers as we develop the platform's core functionality and extend it into new areas. If you're interested in influencing online media and culture dynamics by building a new kind of product system which respects user control and publisher autonomy, check out our careers page for open roles!

Design Manager

Quora is designing social systems to scale access to credible, reliable, useful knowledge. To do so we worked to solve the problems which challenge the Internet in general: community collisions; abuse, harassment, trolling; quality and credibility; "fake news"; and much more. I managed an incredible team of designers working on these challenges and many more: from brand to ranking, ads to formats, internationalization to interfaces.

Quora

Product Design Manager

I worked in Facebook's Core App team on products and features related to: composing, sharing, and posting content to News Feed; novel systems for content creation and capture; alternative sharing flows and destinations; growth and emergent markets; new content types; and related functionality. My team used qualitative research, quantitative user data, and a social systems approach to understand how and why users of different types post, what they share, and what dynamics within the Facebook ecosystem (and without) influence their sharing behavior, and attempted to analyze which directions and classes of experiments were likeliest to be fruitful for users and for Facebook's goals. I also helped onboard new designers and generally had an awesome time with my outstanding team!

Facebook

Product Designer

At Mokriya, I work with an awesome group of designers and developers to make great software for mobile devices. My responsibilities include product design and management for our varied client engagements and in-house product efforts; developing our brand, marketing efforts, site, and collateral materials; and writing about IOT, wearables, mobile, design, technology, and why Mokriya loves to create great software experiences.

I also paste a lot of strange stuff into our Slack room.

Mokriya

Product Design & Marketing

I help design our web and mobile products; my previous role makes it easy to use data from our support operations to supplement analytics data, user-testing, and what we learn directionally iterating to ensure that UX efforts are addressing customer needs (in addition to the product vision and company goals). As I like to nerdily say: customer support is just UX past the edges of product, so the crossflow between these functions is quite important to ensuring smart development prioritization.

Beyond that, it's the usual: wireframing, facilitating communication between stakeholders, pursuing falsifiability and measurability in our designs so we can improve them quickly, etc.

CarWoo!

As manager of our support operations, I was responsible for: ensuring that all CarWoo! users and dealers had insanely happy experiences in the CarWoo! marketplace, maximizing buyer and seller participation and satisfaction; planning and directing all aspects of contact center operations, both outbound and inbound; recruiting, supervising, training, and developing Customer Happiness Representatives; and working closely with the product team to feed what we learn from customers into the development process rapidly and usefully.

Manager, Customer Support Operations

Developed idea for product and company with founder and CEO after initial work on unrelated premise. Designed many early prototypes sites and flows, and was responsible for product ideation, wire-framing / prototyping, and mocks, as well as for product management work with engineers (both in house and contractors abroad). Led efforts to find and hire design talent and transitioned to UX / PM role, collaborating with visual designer and engineering. Due to time constraints, designed final mocks for mobile web experience of Giftly site. Developed investor pitch that we raised on and wrote site copy, ads, and social media posts. Ran customer support to ensure brand integrity and understand customer perspective and reactions. Collaborated with founder and CEO closely on nearly everything: hiring, firing, office selection, technology questions (everything from payments platforms to URL structure), partnerships, and more.

Giftly

Head of Product /  UX Design

Managed teams responsible for corporate escalation resolution, working with ELT and outsource partners and social media to build relationships with customers, as well as teams responsible for: HD.com order-processing and customer support; back-end logistical support of sales teams, including some web application development; and B2B customer support. Worked to devise customer support strategies and implement them across channels and through various media including email and phone. Helped develop systems to capture customer impressions, gauge the efficacy of marketing, supply chain, and support efforts, and feed information back into the business. Worked with vendors and in-house partners to improve analytics for my teams and others.

Responsible for 90 employees across multiple teams and the WFM, retention, and development efforts they required. Received numerous awards for achievements, notably for success in planning for and managing a critical ERP / OMS system upgrade without interrupting any workflows. Improved performance of data entry teams according to all KPIs while improving morale and reducing turnover.

The Home Depot

Contact Center Operations Manager

Managed 55 customer support employees and their leadership team in an effort to turnaround an underperforming part of our contact center. Initiated immense process changes, restructured teams, and increased focus on performance management and quantifiable metrics to successfully transform the group into one of the best-run teams in the division, resulting in reduced costs for DCs and direct-ship vendors in the .com channel as well as improved customer experience.

OE Manager

Managed a 15-agent customer support team in a B2B contact center; developed agents into skilled representatives of the company and, in some cases, leaders, and consistently beat QA, accuracy, and other metrics goals. Responsible for ad-hoc reporting and liaising between DCs and contact centers for Director of CRM.

Group Services Manager, Contact Center

Assisted Group Service Managers in a B2B contact center with agent monitoring and development, reporting, QA, and other tasks; performed ad-hoc reporting tasks for management; was part of the inaugural Leadership Development Program for Home Depot; and worked to resolve escalated customer service issues.

Team Lead

Assisted customers calling into a B2B contact center with a wide variety of order, inventory, payment, and technical issues as an entry-level agent.

Dillard Baker