Harold and Maude is one of my favorite movies because it reminds me to embrace life’s opportunities and not take myself too seriously. As a first-generation high school and college graduate, navigating the tech industry has presented its challenges, but each experience—whether a success or setback—has taught me valuable lessons in risk taking. I’m grateful for the lessons I’ve learned along the way shaping both my approach to design and my personal growth.

I design end-to-end customer experiences informed by research, data, and user insights balanced with intuition. My superpower is being able to quickly understanding complex, technical problems and transforming them into design concepts and prototypes that help teams learn, iterate, and make informed decisions. I firmly believe at the core of building successful products is establishing trust. With trust you are able to move fast, but building trust takes time. We don’t always have time to build trust at the beginning, so finding ways to prioritise that is a common practice for me. I pride myself in being genuine, hardworking, and resilient and that tends to bleed into my work and inspire those around me.

My journey into design is not uncommon; as a young child I always had an interest in design. That was first reflected in my love for handwriting and typography. I would spend my free time learning how to write in cursive, copying the school’s directory. I also loved to draw letters and had many books that showed me different ways to dress up a letter. When I discovered HGTV, I became obsessed with interior design, and my primary hobby was creating floor plans on graph paper and filling homes with hand drawn furniture. There were also many late night bedroom furniture reorganizing parties with my friends. When Myspace became popular, I started to lean into graphic design as a hobby. I created custom designs for my profile in MS Paint and learned some basic HTML and CSS. Flash forward to high school, I was in a business organization called DECA, which accompanied business ownership and marketing courses. The curriculum included teaching us basic skills like public speaking, resume building, and creating presentations. We also ran a student cafe where I was VP of Finance. We competed on local, state and international levels with mock business plans and ad campaigns. I spent hours in MS Paint creating marketing websites and used DaFont to create logotypes for my mock companies. This was when I started to see all of my interests collide for my future in design. I pursued a few internships in my first years of college while working as a bank teller. After graduating with my BA in Design Studies from San Jose State University, I found myself doing the very thing I started to do in high school, creating marketing and sales collateral, but this time for real companies. I transitioned into product design shortly after, sort of on accident. I met someone during a commute between San Jose and San Francisco who asked if I had interest in Mobile App design. The rest is history.