Work Experience

Director, Portfolio Research & Insights, Dropbox June 2023 - Present

Product launches: Dropbox, Dash

Lead a design, marketing, operations, and quant research team of 12 focused on cross-organizational strategic research initiatives.
Achieved an employee rating of 96 for connecting the team's work to the company strategy—a 30-point increase from the previous survey and 15 points above the company average—by developing a vision & strategy for the team.
Managed a $2M+ budget and reduced tooling costs by over $1M.
Created organizational focus identifying and prioritizing customer segments—the first market & customer segmentation to be endorsed by the CEO and executive team.
Influenced executive 3-year planning narratives leading an initiative to identify obstacles and opportunities based on prior research.
Reduced the time to insights from hours to seconds with over 90% accuracy sponsoring an initiative that used a Large Language Model (LLM) together with a knowledge management repository.
Increased data accuracy and workflow efficiency for all research teams and increased the visibility of insights across the company enhancing the research project tracker and insight library using Airtable.
Increased customer-centricity launching programs to connect every Dropbox employee, including executives, with customers.
Informed the company's international growth prioritization and strategy through a series of design and market research studies.

Director, Research, Airtable September 2020 - December 2022

Product launches: Airtable

Founded and managed a marketing, operations, and user research team of 21—15 whom I personally hired, including 5 managers, 3 of whom were promoted. Attained one of the highest employee engagement scores in the company, averaging 83/100 in 2022.
Managed a $2M+ budget and identified ways to reduce tool costs by 25%.
Streamlined the Research team’s workflow and increased the visibility of insights across the company creating a research ecosystem using Airtable.
Defined and shifted the company's strategy to focus on marketing and product operations use cases leading a qualitative and quantitative research initiative in collaboration with cross-functional partners.
Improved the usability of Airtable exceeding an annual company goal to launch 25 product improvements, 2 of which I implemented and launched myself, sponsoring an initiative that identified 75+ usability issues.
Informed Airtable’s flexibly connected return-to-work plan partnering with the Chief People Officer and her team to conduct employee research.

Director, Research, Uber March 2018 - June 2020

Product launches: Uber, Uber Eats, and Uber Works

Increased annual recurring revenue by a projected $66M by increasing awareness, trial, and usage across Uber's services as a result of a company-wide initiative, redesign, and vision for the future of the Uber app informed by a series of strategic research projects.
Defined key business and product decisions for a grocery delivery service for Uber Eats leading foundational research with cross-functional partners and the Uber Eats leadership team.
Increased restaurant selection and order conversion on Uber Eats leading a team conducting foundational and evaluative research across multiple markets for a new form of food delivery.
Increased the Uber Eats mobile app installation conversion by 10% by redesigning the Uber Eats logo informed by brand research.
Saved an estimated 1,000 hours of work annually developing a service to automatically scrape insights, facts, and opportunities, as well as associated metadata, storing it in a repository to make insights discoverable across the entire company.
Automated the analysis and visualization of customer reviews training a neural network with 88% accuracy.

Head of Research, Instagram March 2014 - March 2017

Product launches: Instagram, Bolt, Boomerang, Layout, and Stories

Founded and managed a team of 16 product researchers—all of whom I hired, transitioning 2 to the manager track, and promoting another.
Managed a $1.6M research budget.
Developed a process—known as Rolling Research—for conducting rapid, iterative product research utilized by the Facebook Research team and further refined the process to reduce costs by 80% while increasing moderation quality.
Established a competitive research review with Instagram leadership to understand market trends.
Launched Instagram Stories which had 250M daily active users in the first year leading research with the Instagram leadership team.

Senior User Experience Researcher & Manager, Google July 2010 - March 2014

Product launches: Chrome, Chrome for Mobile, and Chrome OS

Increased performance and reduced memory consumption in Chrome and Chrome OS developing and patenting (US8341519) an algorithm to manage tabs.
Launched and patented (US20150052473) a tab and window manager for Chrome OS, which was empirically shown to improve the efficiency of window management over competitors, the results of which were published at CHI 2016 (14.5% acceptance rate).
Informed hardware and software decisions for Chrome OS and Chromebooks leading 5 cross-functional teams to gather feedback from consumers, students, and teachers across the US during the Chromebook pilot program.

User Experience Researcher, Microsoft October 2007 - June 2010

Product launches: Visio 2010 and the Global Experience Platform for Office 2010

Created the first process for conducting user experience research at the Microsoft Canada Development Center.
Saved 100+ people-hours per testing cycle by developing a service to automate the provisioning of remote usability testing.
Partnered with a designer to rebrand the team's research report template and integrated SharePoint to simplify report creation and retrieval.

Research Fellow, Oxford e-Research Center, University of Oxford October 2006 - September 2007

Published 2 technical reports to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), as well as 1 book chapter and 2 conference papers researching collaboration and project management in e-Science.

Education