About
I’m a lead product designer based in Melbourne, with 15 years in design and the last ten of them in product. I grew up in the US, studied Communications at the University of Washington and have called Melbourne home for a long time now.
I’m also AuDHD, and it’s a big part of how I think and work. I’m drawn to the messy, tangled problems and happy to go deep on them until they make sense.
Most of my work has been inside small teams where the brief was fuzzy or didn’t exist yet. Some of my favourite projects came from staying in that ambiguity long enough to work out what the real problem was.
When I joined TeamHiiv there was no brief, so I started with a product teardown and a round of customer interviews, and used what came out of them to set the design agenda. That’s usually how I begin... go and find out first, then design.
TeamHiiv case studyAt Reejig I was handed “fix search” off the roadmap. Before touching a screen, I pushed for time with our data and ML folks to understand how results were sourced, transformed and ranked. It’s hard to design a good search experience when you don’t know what’s driving it.
Reejig case studyI’ve often been the only designer on the team, and a few times the closest thing we had to a PM. I’ve owned release plans, worked closely with customer success and leadership, and helped engineers stretch into unfamiliar tech. I really enjoy that end of the work, and it’s made me a better collaborator.
What my teams sayWeekly design crits, continuous discovery, opportunity solution trees, regular Loom shares... I like leaving a team with better rituals than it had when I arrived. At TeamHiiv that also meant a tokenised design system, a suite of Claude skills for agentic development and a proper handover package, so the work could keep going after I left.
TeamHiiv case study
What ties these together is complex, high-stakes information that people need to understand and trust before they act on it.
You’ll usually find me with a few projects on the go: crochet, costumes and immersive spaces. I’m an LED hula hooper with a growing collection of my own pixel patterns, I’ve been part of the bass music community and co-directed a New Year’s festival, and lately I’ve been learning LED design and programming. I also founded Aunty Maria’s, a fem-led creative collective.
Climate action is a big part of how I live too. My home is gas-free, runs on rooftop solar and I drive an EV.
