Leading & Scaling Design

TCGplayer

I started working at TCGplayer in 2016, after breaking into the UX field roughly a year before. I joined as the company’s first UX resource. I began with the title UX Designer, and I focused building whatever the most critical product design work the company needed at the time. I reported directly to the now Chief Innovation Officer, and I established the collaboration between Product Design, Engineering, and Product.

 
As the only Product Designer, I embedded directly into the Product Team; and while I led in scaling the design team throughout the 5.5 years I was with the company, we still reported into Product. This gave me a unique perspective on what it meant to fulfill the needs of the business and customer. It also taught me to have a deep understanding of how critical data is to the design process.
Some key projects I worked on during my time as an IC designer at TCGplayer were: several iterations on the TCGplayer marketplace pages, launching the Infinite Content site, and supporting the launch of TCGplayer Storefronts (ecommerce stores for merchants).
During that time, I was also collaborating with my leadership team and advocating for scaling our design operations. This meant socializing the work Product Design was doing through several company all hands, meeting directly with Sr. Leadership on the value design brings to the business, and coordinating across a disjointed Design Team that included one other recently hired Product Designer and a Creative Team of 5 designers.

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This cross coordination took the form of leading Design Sprints that included design resources and various technical resources from across the organization, I also established recurring Design critiques and all hands meetings for all design resources to have regular facetime. 
In addition to fostering an environment of design collaboration and support, I established TCGplayer customer research program. This began as a small operation when I was an IC designer. I would recruit TCGplayer teammates across the org for usability testing and interviews, as many of them used our products and were not involved in product development. In order to get unbiased customer feedback, I also led the integration of Hotjar for on-site customer sentiment and to arrange customer feedback and usability sessions. 

As I led the team in regularly integrating qualitative data into our development and release processes, I collaborated with Product to integrate both Optimizely and Amplitude Analytics. Optimizely enabled teams to easily AB or multivariate test product releases; while Amplitude empowered all technical partners across Design, Product, Engineering, Marketing, and beyond to leverage behavioral data insights from customers. During this time, I was promoted from Product Design Lead to the Product Design Manager, and I officially began leading all Product Design resources and focusing on strategically scaling our operations and supporting all product development and experience needs for the business.
Having multiple streams of customer data at the fingertips  became a habit for the team, we saw first hand how our products were becoming more and more usable. Rather than needing to sell the org on why it’s important, we were all able to see it for ourselves. This ultimately led to me establishing various methods to easily coordinate customer interviews and usability tests for all teams. We called this program our customer research center of excellence; and since it was becoming such a routine practice, I was able to plan for and hire a UX Research team to complement our Product Design team prior to pursuing a new opportunity!

While it was always important to me to scale the design practice at TCGplayer to enhance the customer experience, my first priority has always been, and always is, creating an environment for Designers to thrive. Empowering people to shape the career they dream of is a deep passion of mine, and I was able to begin doing this at TCGplayer, by: