Brookline High School

Brandeis University

Senior Vice President, User Experience Design at Oracle

Seattle, Washington, United States

In my role, I take care of Oracle's user experience discipline for our enterprise applications and middleware. I'm fortunate to work with a team of incredibly talented and positive people including designers, researchers, writers, product and program managers, and engineers. In addition, I partner with Jenny Lam, our SVP of User Experience Design in Brand and Marketing to help drive forward the design and user experience philosophy and practice across all of Oracle's products, services, and experiences.

Oracle

Senior Vice President, User Experience and Design

I am the creator and author of The Madrona Heroes Register series of books. This seven-part series of YA novels explore what happens when a group of Seattle pre-teens suddenly find themselves with superpowers. The series starts with the fourth novel in the series (like Star Wars!) and proceeds through the fifth and six, before delivering the first three 'prequels.' The novels are a delightful complement to the work I do every day helping companies tell their stories through the discipline of design.  Improving my narrative skills has only helped my client work, just as my design responsibilities have helped me produce a professional series of novels. There are now three books in the series available as well as a fourth side novel. Over four hundred thousand words in aggregate.

Madrona Heroes

Author

I was the Partner Design Director at Microsoft, for the Cloud Data and Machine Learning Platform. Delivering an enterprise cloud platform for developers that enables state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and machine learning scenarios is an enormous challenge. Finding ways for a team of product designers and software user researchers to make that complicated journey a seamless experience is an equally difficult challenge. Since returning to Microsoft I have been deeply impressed with how the culture has evolved, and am working hard to find new ways design and user research can impact this complicated space in a way that makes customers more productive, effective, and happier using this industrial strength state-of-the-art technology.

Microsoft

Design Director, Cloud Data and Machine Learning Platform

I was honored to be a board member of <a href="http://BlackPast.org">BlackPast.org</a>. This 13,000 page reference center is dedicated to providing information to the general public on African American history and on the history of the more than one billion people of African ancestry around the world. - See more at: <a href="http://www.blackpast.org">http://www.blackpast.org</a>

- As of May 2017 I concluded my board responsibilities and spent my remaining time as a Technology Advisor for BlackPast.)

BlackPast.org

Board Member and Technology Advisor

F. Scott Fitzgerald said “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Here are our two opposing ideas. The first idea is that Jenny Lam, and Hillel Cooperman, and the team they’ve built at Jackson Fish Market are industry leaders with decades of experience who will bring mountains of expertise, perspective, and passion to the challenges that lie before your team, your product, and your business. The second idea is that Jenny and Hillel look at each new engagement as an opportunity to start from scratch. They come into each new situation looking to learn as much as possible, and ultimately give voice not to their “decades of experience” but to your team’s voice your team’s vision, and your team’s values. We’re incredibly fortunate that our clients are very bright and don’t look at these two notions as oppositional. Neither do we.

At Jackson Fish Market, Jenny Lam (my co-founder) and I strive to provide clarity through design at all phases of the product development and business process. Through design strategy, user interface design, visual design, marketing communication design, design training, and event and environment design, we strive to support every facet of the customer experience you are building. From the high-level, down to the key details, this is our passion. This is what we do.

Jackson Fish Market

Chief Product Officer, Co-Founder

The most recent and broad position I held at Microsoft was being responsible for the Windows desktop user experience - in other words, the Shell team. The desktop user experience hadn't been updated significantly since Windows XP, and Apple had taken a commanding lead in mindshare and innovation with the release of MacOS X. I managed a 130+ person team responsible for researching, designing, and delivering the new AERO desktop user experience. That design has stayed relatively stable and usable over several versions of Windows. Most importantly, our team, due greatly to the talent of the people who I had the pleasure of working with, was responsible for up-leveling the entire discipline and contributions of customer-centric design and designers at Microsoft. Where the discipline had been an after-thought, our team made a name for itself, and got a seat at the table, and in some cases, the seat at the head of the table when it came to making product decisions.

Other roles I held at Microsoft during this period include: Lead Program Manager - Internet Explorer for Macintosh, Group Program Manager - MSN Explorer, and Product Unit Manager - Microsoft Max.

Hillel Cooperman 🏳️‍🌈