I believe the most successful organizations make human-centered thinking part of the fabric of their culture, not something owned by UX alone. Throughout my career, I've helped teams shift from technology-first to customer-first thinking by introducing practical frameworks, shared ways of working, and scalable programs that align Product, Engineering, Design, and business stakeholders around a shared vision of customer outcomes.
NextEra Energy · Bringing Human-Centered Design to AI
At NextEra Energy, I helped bring human-centered thinking to one of the company's most important emerging areas: AI.
As part of the Human-Centered Design team, I helped create the AI Test Kitchen, an interactive experience showcased at the company's Quality, Safety & Innovation Expo.
Rather than simply demonstrating AI technology, I helped teach leaders and employees how research, rapid prototyping, experimentation, and human judgment could be used to create better AI experiences.
The exhibit reinforced a simple principle: successful AI products start with people, not technology. It received the Best Quality Learning Experience Award for its impact on educating the broader organization.
UKG · Scaling Innovation with LightStarters
At UKG, I co-created LightStarters, a lightweight innovation framework that adapted Human-Centered Design, Design Thinking, Google Design Sprint practices, and Lean Startup principles to the realities of enterprise software development.
The framework helped teams validate ideas earlier, align around customer problems, and reduce investment in solutions that had not yet been tested.
To scale the practice, I created facilitator guides, training materials, and a certification program that enabled Product, Design, and other stakeholders to lead sessions independently. The program grew into a network of Design Thinking champions across the organization, supported more than 25 cross-functional innovation workshops in the first year, and received a Great Place to Work® Leadership Innovation Award.
Citrix · Making Design Everyone's Business
At Citrix, I helped champion the Design Matters initiative, created to shift the organization from technology-first to people-first thinking.
I led Design Thinking workshops inspired by Stanford d.school methods, bringing Product, Engineering, and Design together to build customer empathy, define problems collaboratively, and rapidly explore solutions through ideation and prototyping.
The goal was bigger than teaching a design process. It was to create a shared language for solving problems together and make human-centered thinking accessible beyond the UX organization.
A Consistent Leadership Philosophy
Across each organization, the context was different, but the goal was the same: make human-centered thinking scalable.
For me, design leadership is not only about creating great experiences. It is about building the culture, capabilities, and ways of working that enable entire organizations to create them.
That is when design becomes more than a function. It becomes a competitive advantage.