The past seven years have been about propelling growth at a new early-stage consulting company and, before that, a global consulting firm.
Reporting directly to the CEO, I spearheaded diverse growth initiatives across company strategy, customer experience, client engagement, sales enablement, B2B marketing, and sales.
Also, in these roles, I supported large-scale experience-driven transformations for clients across a wide range of UX, product, and innovation initiatives. 📈
Structuring Project Engagements
After assessing client challenges, it's time to build out the engagement. Depending on the program's scope, this could include discovery, research, strategy, UX Design, and development. We typically like to "show our work" to clients be as upfront and transparent as possible to help them understand the journey needed to help them deliver the required experience to the market.
Client Product Strategy
Working with different clients across verticals, I'm often called to help develop early product strategies for client challenges. Starting with a conversation and a list of questions, I turn their needs into a high-level strategy for experience-driven improvements, setting the foundation for more extensive programs to empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and launch!
Culture Change Workshop & Playbook
Many times, when clients ask for improvements, their culture is a blocker. I helped define a playbook for assisting internal teams in understanding digital transformation efforts and positioning the company and leadership to get everyone rowing in the right direction. I then ran this workshop with our largest client to customize the plan for their unique culture.
Account Planning Framework
Working directly with the CEO, I created a complete companywide account planning framework for growing current accounts within our company. This included tools to build out relationship maps, strategic priorities, mapping challenges -- and a fill-in-the-blank proactive proposal.
Defining Design Sprints
While we also run by-the-book Design Sprints, we've modified the design sprint to match an agile development sprint cadence better. This way, we can stay one sprint ahead (dual-track sprints) and track UX Design velocity throughout the program.
Driving our Message with Fortune 500 & Global Clients
Weekly, I meet with multiple client stakeholders: CIO, CTO, CDO, CXO, CPO, etc... to determine their current experience challenges and then help them understand the path to achieve their goals. This is part of showcasing the capabilities and experience of my company and then helping them understand the power of design thinking and how it can be applied to help them solve their biggest business challenges.
Developed a Professional Organization Focused on Experiences
I ideated and led the team behind the Experience Driven Leadership Alliance, a professional services group that caters to leaders within organizations focusing on delivering better experiences. This group had leaders from Intuit, Toyota, 7-11, GM, and more - across multiple local markets, drawing 100s of business leaders per meeting.
Leading Analysts Calls
I often review our company differentiators, history, and methods to analysts, including Gartner, Forrester, and other vertical-specific groups. Analysts typically want to go deeper into how your service your B2B clients, types of projects, processes, wins, and metrics.
B2B Product Marketing
Part of supporting company growth was developing new products and services. I have a knack for distilling complex services and turning them into easy-to-understand packages that our business development teams can use to showcase to clients our ability to help them succeed.
Thought Leadership Webinar
I developed a practitioner-level monthly webinar called "LevelUp" that allowed our most brilliant team members to share back with the community on topics like "Being a UX Designer in an agile development team", "Lifecycle of a Design System," and "Implementing Agile in Large Enterprises" I MC'd the programs, which quickly grew to 100s of members.
Training & Awareness
As a de facto spokesperson for projetk202, I'm often called to help others in our global organization understand what our organization does, our value, what "experience-driven transformation" is, and how it can be applied to our clients. We've devised several ways to educate teams, including webinars, videos, articles, and podcasts.
Business Development Training
I've built out our Business Development 101 training to help them better understand our organization, our products, and services, how design thinking and user experience drive business results, and what kinds of conversations they should be having with different parts of the client organization.
Team Retention and Recognition
With the recent "great resignation," retention is more critical than ever. As part of our ongoing commitment to culture and our teams, I developed a strategy to drive more modern ways of recognition across the organization in a more timely manner that would cause more consistent results for team retention.
B2B Professional Services Marketing Strategy
Working across a matrixed organization, I developed a plan of action for our marketing budget based on the needs of local markets and what drives business in each area. Working with a wide range of general managers, I distilled all the requirements into a high-level set of themes, which led to a more detailed marketing plan.
B2B Marketing Planning
From the themes, I developed a detailed marketing strategy that included a mix of account-based marketing, digital marketing, and event marketing. This included a new corporate team supporting the initiatives, marketing vendors, and new martech tools.
Product Management Solution & Marketing
I helped develop the product management service that we provide to clients. Based on my experience in the product development space, I created product marketing materials in an easy-to-understand format around the value product management brings to an organization.
Company & Sales Strategy
Working with the CEO, I often drove new company initiatives to the rest of the management team. In this case, we're showcasing a new method that helps drive growth from "capabilities to programs" -- growing our solutions over time and becoming a more holistic partner to our clients.
Customer Experience & Customer Loyalty
I built a framework for ensuring our clients are more loyal and excited to be our ongoing partners. This included several activities and a team to run them. Everything from go-live events to creating executive off-sites. Everything we'd need to start apart from the competition.
Branding Guidelines
Over time, we modified the branding of our marketing materials, website, and more. I've led each effort and helped build out everything from brand guidelines to new deck materials.
