About

Background, experience, and interests

I’m Barb, a strategic design leader who is passionate about leading empowered teams that elevate design. This means I strive to help design teams solve meaningful problems for users, derisk and drive product decisions, and develop desirable and viable products. I also work to create an inclusive environment for designers where they can feel supported, psychologically safe, and enabled to take risks and grow their careers.

I have over 15 years of experience and have worked at companies ranging from small startups to large enterprise businesses like Google, Cisco, Salesforce, Adobe, Atlassian, and more. Due to this diverse range of experiences I have a number of domains of expertise:

Strategic design

I have led multiple teams developing vision artifacts that influenced or articulated a business’s strategy. I have also led a team developing a strategic designer training, helped operationalize it, and assisted with building a new line of business around it.

0-1 Product Development

For over 2 years I led the design team for a large tech company’s incubator where we helped almost 40 teams and founders. During this time I helped develop and operationalize new user-centric processes, elevate design to help drive product definition, build cross-functional partnerships, and develop processes for AI product development.

Leading, teaching, and coaching

With a background in psychology, I lead teams with a drive to understand, support, and empower. I approach leadership as a creative practice and am continuously seeking to learn and improve my approaches based on evolving contexts and people

Experience

Learn more on LinkedIn

My life outside work

This is my family. We love creating, though we tend to use different mediums. I love to paint and draw, my partner loves to cook, and my son loves to build elaborate lego cities. That said, we all enjoy collaborating together to create family masterpieces.

My husband has worked as a teacher, head of school and now runs a reading remediation center. As a couple who leads teams with a strong interest in learning and growth, we bring a growth-mindset as well as a teaching and coaching mentality to everything we do.

My son is four and is my ultimate leadership trainer. He doesn’t take any sh*t and gives straightforward feedback. If I don’t use leadership best practices (eg. set clear expectations, explain the why behind a request, enable autonomy, etc) he lets me know using extreme-radical candor.

When I’m not hanging out with my family you can find me running, drawing, playing the drums or piano, or going on travel adventures.