User Experience Researcher,
Lead / Senior / Manager
Welcome! Open to Strategic UXR Leadership Roles.
For the past 18 years, my professional focus has been on human-centered design, putting User Research into practice for customer-facing products. I have directly partnered with Design and Product leaders to deliver new-to-market experiences across both digital and physical domains.
My goal is to secure a UXR leadership position with significant strategic influence. I thrive on uncovering customer insights that lead to feature differentiation, high-impact product improvements, and more effective roadmaps or KPIs. I am seeking a full-time role, ideally hybrid or remote, where I can apply these skills.
Driving strategic Product and Design decisions with customer insights.
My recent experience…
During my five-year tenure at Amazon Corporate, I spearheaded User Research for Amazon Photos, a cloud storage service across mobile, web, desktop, and device personalization (Echo Show/Fire TV). I established the research function as a solo practitioner before hiring and managing a team of two additional researchers. My core focus was embedding customer insights into strategic decisions by partnering closely with Product and Design leadership (VPs/Directors) and championing Amazon's 'working backward from the customer' principle. This approach yielded significant results, helping scale the user base from 9M to 33M and maintaining strong engagement with 84% annual retention.
My impact extended across several key areas:
Strategic Leadership & Foundational Design: As a member of the Design Leadership Team, I directed the research underpinning a major app redesign and the development of a new unified Design System.
Driving High-Impact Features: My research prompted the creation of a new Echo Show personalization feature, now a key customer retention driver on 2 million devices and featured in the newest Amazon Devices Alexa+ launch.
Optimizing Core Experiences: Collaborating directly with Principal Engineers and Applied Sciences, we boosted the accuracy of Search queries—our most requested feature—from 50% to 85% for both text entry and LLM.
Continuous Improvement & Collaboration: Through my direction, my team’s work also included refining usability details (e.g., upload status) and translating complex BI data into actionable user understanding. Additionally, I built a strong community of practice with researcher leaders across Amazon, specifically focused on sharing insights to promote more cohesive customer experiences across different products and touchpoints.
To view my past experience, please see my LinkedIn.
About Me
Currently based in Minnesota with my two children, I love being outdoors and embrace all the local seasons. My perspective has been shaped by exploration – from outdoor backpacking adventures in Oregon and Washington during my early adulthood, to navigating the vibrant energy of Toronto ("the New York of Canada"). A grounding experience was studying abroad in the Czech Republic that sparked a lasting passion for art history. Today, I enjoy sharing that passion by volunteering at my kids local elementary school, teaching critical thinking through art in partnership with Minneapolis Institute of the Arts.