Building a design organization that scaled to an exit
Glassdoor was growing faster than its design could keep up. I built the organization, the research practice, and the first design system that let product quality scale with the company — through the growth years that led to a $1.2B acquisition.
UX
Hired, structured, and coached a 20+ person product design and research organization — building the leveling, critique culture, and operating rhythms that let quality scale with the company.
Led design and research as one practice, moving research upstream from downstream validation into the input that shaped roadmap decisions.
Created Glassdoor's first comprehensive design system, turning repeated patterns into shared speed and one consistent voice across job search, reviews, salaries, and employer tools.
Glassdoor was growing faster than its design could keep up. The fix wasn't better screens — it was an organization.
As Senior Director of UX, Product Design, and User Research, I led a multi-disciplinary team across job search, company reviews, salary insights, mobile, and employer-facing products. The mandate was two-sided: help job seekers make higher-confidence career decisions, and give product teams a faster, more consistent way to ship.
Getting there meant building the things that never show up in a single screen — a hiring and leveling structure, a research practice with a real seat in roadmap decisions, and a design system that made quality repeatable instead of heroic.
Scale was outrunning craft. Every team was solving the same problems a little differently, and the highest-stakes moment in the product — a person deciding where to work — was getting harder to navigate, not easier.
- Search, reviews, salaries, and company content competed for attention at the exact moment users needed clarity.
- Product teams had no shared design language, so every surface drifted.
- Research arrived after decisions were made — validating them instead of shaping them.
- Design quality depended on individual heroics, not a system — which doesn't scale with headcount.
I treated the organization, the research practice, and the design system as one connected system — because product quality at scale is an organizational outcome, not an individual one.
Build the org, not just the work
Hired, leveled, and coached a 20+ person team, and set the critique and operating rhythms that keep quality high as a team grows.
Give research a seat upstream
Moved research from downstream validation into roadmap input, so user evidence shaped what got built, not just how it looked.
Make quality a system
Created Glassdoor's first comprehensive design system, turning repeated patterns into shared speed and a consistent voice across the product.
This is the org-scale proof point in my portfolio: building a design organization — hiring, coaching, leveling, integrating research, and standing up the systems — through a period where design quality, product velocity, and business outcomes all had to mature at the same time. It's the foundation the AI-native work later stood on.
Built and led the org
Recruited, coached, and structured a 20+ person design and research team across the company's core product areas.
Research integrated, not outsourced
Led product design and user research as one practice, so evidence and craft advanced together rather than in sequence.
Systems as leverage
Stood up the first design system and patterns that let a growing org ship consistently and faster.
Product and system work
The work scaled because the team, the product strategy, and the design system matured together.
A design org built to scale
Recruited, coached, and structured a 20+ person product design and research organization across job search, reviews, salaries, and employer products — with the leveling and rhythms to keep quality high as it grew.
Glassdoor's first design system
Turned repeated UI patterns into a shared system that improved consistency and delivery speed across the product, and pioneered patented UX solutions along the way.
Growth toward a $1.2B exit
Built the design organization and systems during the high-growth years that led to Glassdoor's $1.2B acquisition.