The product was changing.
The design team needed to change with it.
At Nextiva, I worked on both.
I helped define the future of a connected customer communications platform while leading the design organization responsible for bringing it to life.
Creative Director of Product → Director of Product Design → Lead Product Designer
The product was changing.
The design team needed to change with it.
At Nextiva, I worked on both.
I helped define the future of a connected customer communications platform while leading the design organization responsible for bringing it to life.
Creative Director of Product → Director of Product Design →
Lead Product Designer
The product was changing.
The design team needed to change with it.
At Nextiva, I worked on both.
I helped define the future of a connected customer communications platform while leading the design organization responsible for bringing it to life.
Creative Director of Product →
Director of Product Design →
Lead Product Designer
Nextiva was evolving from a VoIP company into a connected customer communications platform. Bringing voice, chat, messaging, CRM, sales, and service together.
I joined as Creative Director of Product and later became Director of Product Design, leading UX, UI, research, and product design strategy across the platform.
My work happened at two levels:
- Helping define what the product could become, and
- Building the team and systems that could get us there.
Nextiva was evolving from a VoIP company into a connected customer communications platform. Bringing voice, chat, messaging, CRM, sales, and service together.
I joined as Creative Director of Product and later became Director of Product Design, leading UX, UI, research, and product design strategy across the platform.
My work happened at two levels:
- Helping define what the product could become, and
- Building the team and systems that could get us there.
Nextiva was evolving from a VoIP company into a connected customer communications platform. Bringing voice, chat, messaging, CRM, sales, and service together.
I joined as Creative Director of Product and later became Director of Product Design, leading UX, UI, research, and product design strategy across the platform.
My work happened at two levels:
- Helping define what the product could become, and
- Building the team and systems that could get us there.
Start with the experience, not the feature set.
We had 12 weeks to define a vision for Nextiva's digital channels product.
The challenge wasn't a single workflow. We needed to understand how sales and service teams moved through an entire day — who they talked to, what they needed to know, and where communication broke down.
Working with my PM partner and VP of Design, we used Jobs to be Done, persona stories, and experience maps to find the patterns across those journeys.
The goal was to stop thinking channel by channel and start designing around the customer relationship.
Start with the experience, not the feature set.
We had 12 weeks to define a vision for Nextiva's digital channels product.
The challenge wasn't a single workflow. We needed to understand how sales and service teams moved through an entire day — who they talked to, what they needed to know, and where communication broke down.
Working with my PM partner and VP of Design, we used Jobs to be Done, persona stories, and experience maps to find the patterns across those journeys.
The goal was to stop thinking channel by channel and start designing around the customer relationship.
We created experience maps for each persona to help our stakeholders understand how and why we got to our vision.
Turn the vision into something people could align around.
The experience maps became the foundation for a larger journey map: a shared picture of where we could innovate, automate, and differentiate across the customer experience.
Then we put it in front of cross-functional leaders and asked them to pressure-test it with us.
The vision gave product, design, and leadership something to align around — and a way to start breaking the future into things we could actually build.
This was the aspirational flow I created to keep us focused on the vision as we got in the weeds.
Keep the big idea visible as the work gets small.
With the strategy in place, I moved back into the product. We had three jobs to solve:
- See every interaction with a customer in one place.
- Communicate across channels in one place.
- Use context to help prioritize what needs attention.
I created an aspirational flow to keep the larger experience visible as we moved into individual screens and workflows.
The vision wasn't meant to be built all at once. It was there to keep the pieces moving in the same direction.
Put the customer at the center.
The strategy pointed us toward two new product surfaces: an inbox for incoming conversations and a reimagined customer detail experience.
I owned the customer detail experience.
Before the redesign, cases, sales, and interactions lived separately. We reorganized the model around the customer instead: every conversation, interaction, and activity rolled up into one continuous view.
That meant a sales or service rep could understand the relationship — and communicate with the customer — without piecing together context across the product.
The product model changed.
Our design model had to change with it.
Our design team was organized around specialties: UX, UI, and research.
That made sense when work could move cleanly from one discipline to another. It made less sense for the connected product we were trying to build.
I reorganized the team toward full-stack product designers, supported by Design and Research Ops.
The goal wasn't to make everyone good at everything. It was to give designers more ownership from problem through product.
A platform needed a shared design language.
As Nextiva expanded across CRM, chat, onboarding, sales, and service, individual teams couldn't keep solving the same foundational UI problems independently.
NextOS gave us a shared system to build from.
The design system wasn't just about consistency. It gave teams more room to focus on the product problems that were actually different.
I partnered with a small group of front-end engineers to define the roadmap and priority. The design team worked together to create and document the components.
Player and coach.
My work at Nextiva moved constantly between altitudes: defining product direction, getting into the details of an interaction, building systems, developing designers, and changing how the team worked.
I could spend one part of my day working on UX strategy or concepts and another in 1:1s with my team. That's how I came to think about design leadership: part player, part coach.
I didn't want leadership to mean getting further away from the work. I wanted it to mean creating the conditions for more great work to happen.
