Director of User Experience

SolarWinds

August 2013 – September 2021 · Austin, Texas

Eight years. Three times company growth. Multiple acquisitions. A team that grew from a handful of designers into a 30-person global organization spanning five countries. SolarWinds is where I became the design leader I am now.

I joined as Director of UX and spent the next eight years building: the team, the systems, the culture, and the organizational muscle that let design keep pace with a company growing faster than most orgs can manage. I contributed to strategic planning, annual budgets, and product roadmaps at the executive level. And I learned how to hold together a global design organization through rapid change without losing the quality of the work or the people doing it.

I built the NOVA Design System from scratch, which made a full platform UI overhaul possible. I introduced a dashboarding framework, built a landing page experimentation program, and launched an in-product cross-sell model that improved retention. I also led a cross-functional customer journey mapping effort that gave the whole organization a shared view of the user lifecycle. Through it all, I evolved the team from a fully embedded model to a hybrid structure that scaled with the org.

Design Systems

NOVA Design System

Created and institutionalized an enterprise design system used across 13 product lines. Cut delivery time by 30% and established the consistency that made a large, distributed team function like one. Unified the experience across on-premise, hybrid, and cloud environments.

↓ 30% delivery time · 13 product lines unified

Platform

Platform UI Redesign

Led a full platform overhaul of the observability and IT management product spanning on-premise, hybrid, and cloud environments. The NOVA Design System made this possible at the scale required, with consistency across every surface.

Consistent cross-environment experience

Growth

Cross-Sell and Landing Page Programs

Built an in-product cross-sell model that improved customer retention by making adjacent product value visible at the right moment. Ran a landing page experimentation program that gave the marketing and product teams a repeatable system for testing and learning.

Improved retention · Repeatable experimentation system

Strategy

UX ROI Framework

Introduced a UX ROI framework that made the business case for design investment legible to the executive team. Secured the first dedicated design budget in company history and used it to build the team and tools that supported 3x company growth.

First design budget in company history

M&A / Org Design

Post-Acquisition Integration

Led design through multiple acquisitions, unifying global teams through shared design standards, governance, and career frameworks. The goal wasn't just consistency in the work; it was building a shared culture and professional identity across teams that had never worked together before.

Shared standards across merged orgs · High retention