I partner with product leadership to identify the right problems before any wireframe gets drawn. My work sits at the intersection of user research, systems thinking, and business strategy.
Staff Product Designer with deep experience in education technology and financial services. I specialize in two-sided marketplace design, balancing what users need with what businesses require at the same time.
I start with the problem, not the solution. That sometimes means reframing the brief, pushing back on scope, or running research that changes direction entirely before any wireframes exist.
Niche is a two-sided marketplace. Schools pay to reach prospective students. Students use Niche to discover and research colleges. The business works when those two sides connect meaningfully.
Higher ed was facing a demographic cliff. Niche was already great at the moment a student first showed interest in a school: a follow, a save, an info request. The problem was everything after. Students were signaling intent, then stalling out before applying, before responding to outreach, before accepting a Direct Admissions offer. Schools were watching qualified interest leak out of their funnels and had no way to act on it. The initial brief leaned toward a school-facing messaging tool, where schools would nudge students into the next step. My first move was to reframe it.
Students are following, saving, requesting info, then going quiet. Schools see the signal arrive in their CRM, then watch it die before it ever becomes an application. No way to act at the right moment.
Students follow 5–10 schools and have no way to know what each one expects next. School outreach hits as a wall of email. They can't tell what's important, what's optional, what they've missed. The default is to freeze.
The anxiety students feel is the leakage schools see. One problem. Two surfaces. Nurture the student forward from interest with a clear next step, and the school's yield metric moves on its own.
I ran discovery research with 10–12 schools and pulled CRM integration data showing exactly where interested students were going dark: between the follow and the application, between school outreach and a response, between a Direct Admissions offer and an accept. Then I leaned on existing Direct Admissions student research that had already mapped the emotional shape of the enrollment funnel. Affinity mapping across all three sources made the pattern obvious: students weren't dropping off because they'd lost interest. They were dropping off because the process felt opaque and overwhelming.
"The school sent me an email but I didn't know if I was supposed to do something. I just kind of waited."
Students described the window between "I like this school" and "I've taken a real next step" as a black box. They had no map of remaining steps, no sense of what was meaningful versus marketing, no way to tell whether silence meant "you're fine" or "you missed something." Multiply that by the 5–10 schools each student was following, and the anxiety was paralyzing.
The reframe didn't land in a single meeting. I made the case in pieces, across three review sessions: first the CRM data showing where interest died, then the affinity map of student anxiety quotes, then the auto-complete risk memo. Each one peeled back another layer of why the school-controlled framing wouldn't actually move yield. By the third session, the question in the room had changed from "how do we build the messaging tool?" to "how do we build the student journey?"
Schools send nudges to push students into the next step. School-controlled prompts, with auto-complete features that would mark tasks "done" on the student's behalf. Risk: misrepresents progress to both sides.
Show every requirement upfront. Let students own and verify their own progress. School messaging becomes a supportive layer, not the primary driver. Yield moves because the student experience finally moves.
A task-based experience that meets students at the moment they show interest in a school, then walks them forward step by step. Schools define what "next" looks like for them. Niche surfaces it in a format students recognize: a clear list of meaningful next actions, the trusted Inbox channel for school messages tied to each one, and progress that the student owns.
A personalized list of next steps for each school they've followed: request info, schedule a visit, start an application, accept a Direct Admissions offer, finalize enrollment. School messages threaded to the action they're about. No more guessing what comes next.
A portal to define the enrollment journey end to end, send task-tied nudges at the moments that move the funnel, and see exactly where interested students are stalling. The first time many schools had visibility into the full window between interest and enrollment.
Configures the steps from "interested" to "enrolled" for their funnel: visit, apply, accept DA offer, deposit. Done once per cycle.
For each followed school, renders the student's next meaningful action, threaded with school messages from Inbox.
Knows what each school expects of them, what counts as a meaningful next step, and what they've already done.
The product's value to schools wasn't uniform. Some needed basic ways to reach interested students. Others needed customizable journeys and a portal to manage them. Others wanted full personalization and expanded reach. PM led the commercial structure and the pricing case to leadership. My contribution was the feature mapping: translating the school-maturity patterns I'd seen in research into which capabilities sat in which tier, and where the upgrade pressure would naturally land. The product became a new revenue category that didn't exist before the project started.
PM owned the commercial structure and managed school-side stakeholders. I owned the strategic reframe, ran the school discovery interviews, synthesized across CRM data and existing Direct Admissions student research, and designed the experience end-to-end. Our data lead built the funnel instrumentation that let us measure influence honestly: not "did Yield touch this enrollment," but "did the student act because of it."
The harder fight wasn't the reframe. Leadership was leaning hard into Inbox as Yield's primary delivery channel because schools loved Inbox. It was the highest-perceived-value surface clients had. But Inbox's value to students was its signal-to-noise ratio. Pumping more partner-driven content through it was the fastest way to recreate the email problem Inbox had just solved. I argued Yield should use Inbox surgically, only for messages tied to a specific student task, and keep the rest of the experience on the Yield surface itself. That position took two months of repeated framing to land. The Inbox channel stayed clean. The Inbox case study covers the other side of that fight.
Half the value of designing this product was choosing what it wouldn't do. Three calls shaped the v1 more than anything we shipped.
The cycle metrics matter, but the more durable outcome was what Yield seeded for the rest of the org. Two patterns from this project are now in use beyond it.
The school-side journey-configuration pattern Yield introduced (schools defining "what counts as a meaningful next step" once per cycle) has been picked up by other PMs as a reusable building block for school-facing tooling.
The measurement approach our data lead built for Yield (defining "influence" as the student acting after a Yield touchpoint, not just being touched) became the standard way Niche measures enrollment impact across products.
The Inbox-channel tension was the fight I should have anticipated, not reacted to. I framed Yield's reframe well, then walked into the channel debate without a position prepared. Two months of repeated framing got it landed, but if I'd written the channel-integrity memo on day one, sitting next to the auto-complete one, it would have landed in two weeks. Strategic foresight is the staff move I keep practicing.
The commercial tier structure was a late addition, slotted in once design was nearly final. Tier construction wasn't my deliverable, but PM was figuring out the structure in parallel without the school-maturity patterns from research in hand. Next time I'd hand that synthesis to PM in week two, not week ten, so the tier story emerges with the design instead of bolted on.
And on advocacy method: the gradual-research-artifacts approach worked, but it cost time. Most of the artifacts I built were genuinely needed for the design; the strategic memos that turned the room could have been written first, on their own, as one-page recommendations. Next time I'd separate the strategic-influence artifacts from the design artifacts and ship them on different timelines.
Niche had the data showing student interest. Schools had real updates to send: direct admissions offers, application deadlines, campus visits and events. But the communication layer between them was fractured: emails going to spam, messages sent at the wrong moment, no centralized place for students to manage outreach from schools they actually cared about.
The initial brief was to improve message deliverability. I argued it was a bigger structural problem than that.
Students applying to college receive enormous amounts of outreach. The problem wasn't a lack of messages. It was that students couldn't distinguish the ones that mattered. We interviewed 13 students and pulled behavioral data on what they actually opened. The pattern was sharp: students glanced at messages but only clicked in when they recognized the school name. Everything else got filtered as noise, and once a channel earned that filter, it didn't get unfiltered.
Sales wanted to sell lead lists so schools could message students who hadn't engaged. The Director of Product was building partner value around it. I argued the moment we let in unengaged outreach, we'd recreate the email problem we were solving, and lose the open rate that made Inbox worth building.
Offers sent to students who already showed interest in a school. Clear signal.
Communications from schools the student actively tracks.
Responses to student-initiated interactions. Two-way engagement.
Schools that purchased access but have no mutual interest. This is the noise.
Undifferentiated blasts to large student lists. Recreates the email problem.
Offers sent to students who hadn't shown interest, but represent a real admission. Allowed in the inbox because the value is genuine. A school pursuing you is different from a school marketing to you. This created a volume risk, which led directly to the filtering and sorting work.
We landed on a two-tier inbox. The primary view stayed scoped to schools the student had already engaged with, protecting the signal. A secondary filter let students opt into messages from unengaged schools, on their own terms. Sales got the partner value they needed. Students kept the inbox they trusted.
Before locking the architecture, I prototyped the two-tier flow and tested it with students. The question was whether the secondary filter would feel like punishment ("schools you don't care about") or autonomy ("messages I'm choosing to see"). We iterated on the label and entry point until students described it the second way without prompting.
PM partnered on strategy and pushed the partner-value lens. I anchored every decision in the student experience. Our data lead handled instrumentation and post-launch measurement. By the end, students had learned Inbox was high-signal, every message they opened reinforced the trust. That trust was the channel Yield would later need to convert.
Single destination for all school-to-student communications. Clean, personal, scannable.
First product tested in inbox. Made offers feel like personal pursuit rather than generic marketing.
Student controls for managing inbox content. Safeguard against volume creep from prospective DAs.
Push and email notifications to bring students back. The inbox gives us content worth returning for.
Students respond directly to schools. Turns one-way communication into two-way conversation.
Primary signal, secondary opt-in
5x the email baseline
Students returning for signal
Trusted channel for enrollment
Saying no to a bad proposal is easy. Saying yes to a better one is harder, and more useful. Sales had a real revenue ask. The Director of Product had a real constraint. The student need wasn't negotiable. The work wasn't designing the inbox; it was finding the third option that didn't betray any of them.
Most product disagreements aren't user-vs-business in any clean way. They're framing problems. The job is to find the design that makes both sides true.
Niche operates as a two-sided marketplace. Schools pay to connect with prospective students. For that to work, students need to engage, and convert into leads schools care about.
Heading into 2023 planning, the graduate segment was our lowest-performing vertical. Traffic was thin. Engagement was thinner. Selling products to grad schools was hard because we couldn't show the audience.
To unlock business value here, we needed to understand what grad searchers actually wanted from us, and how we could help them connect with schools in a way that felt useful.
The brief was to fix the grad segment. The obvious play was a redesign sprint. I led the team toward discovery first instead. The segment's weakness was a product problem, and we couldn't fix what we hadn't diagnosed.
I started with secondary research: articles, guides, anything that helped grad seekers think through what to consider. The goal was to understand what the search process looked like outside of Niche before we tried to fix it inside.
Then I ran a discovery workshop with PM, engineering, and data. We documented every known and assumption about grad users. From that, we wrote a problem statement to align the team:
"When a grad seeker researches grad schools on Niche, they often find a lack of high-level details about each school, which forces them elsewhere to find and compare programs."
Five knowledge gap themes emerged from the workshop:
These gaps shaped the research plan and the questions we'd ask real users.
I led interviews with 12 prospective grad students. People who had recently started a program, or been accepted and were waiting to begin. We dug into how they searched, what they prioritized, and what made them choose one program over another.
The population was deliberate. Students still mid-search would speculate. Alumni would reconstruct from memory. Recent enrollees were close enough to remember what actually drove their decisions, with enough distance to articulate it clearly. Twelve hit saturation. The last few interviews echoed the first.
Four themes came through clearly:
Cost was the top priority. Students needed to know total program cost and available scholarships before anything else.
Outcomes mattered more than prestige. Students wanted to know what jobs the degree led to and what salary to expect.
Peer experience was a strong signal. Student-to-professor ratio, faculty backgrounds, and reviews carried real weight.
Schedule flexibility was non-negotiable. Most searchers were evaluating whether they could attend while keeping their jobs.
The most surprising finding was different. It changed how we thought about the entire segment:
Grad students choose schools the way undergrads do, by institutional reputation and rankings. Programs are secondary.
Grad students choose by program fit first. School reputation is a secondary filter, not the starting point.
The product had the search model backwards. We were surfacing schools when students were looking for programs.
A SWOT analysis confirmed what interviews suggested. No platform was doing a good job surfacing the information grad searchers needed. Even schools themselves buried it. That was the opportunity.
I led a user journey mapping session with the team to document where the current experience broke down, and where we had the most opportunity to close the gap between what students wanted and what we showed them.
From that work, we aligned on a product vision:
Niche creates connections between grad searchers and schools at the program level, surfacing essential information on affordability, outcomes, and student experience.
Success criteria we defined together:
Searchers can go from search to connecting with a school without leaving Niche.
Searchers can identify programs that fit their schedule and lifestyle needs.
Searchers can evaluate ROI and program quality at the program level, not just the school level.
Searchers can signal interest in a specific program when connecting to a school.
I facilitated a cross-functional ideation session. Each team member sketched how they'd solve the problem. We converged on what was technically feasible and most aligned with student needs.
The direction broke from our standard product. Each graduate program would have its own presence on Niche, surfacing cost, format, schedule, specialization, and student outcomes at the program level rather than the school level. This mirrored how grad students actually searched.
It also changed the data relationship with our partner schools. They'd need to provide richer, program-level data through the partner portal.
Usability testing on a working prototype surfaced two issues:
Both were resolved before launch.
I designed for the full architecture: each program with its own profile page, mirroring how grad students actually searched. Leadership made the call that the infrastructure lift wasn't justified by the segment's size, and notified the team after the decision. The retrofit captured the essential program-level information on existing school pages. It wasn't the architecture I wanted, but it shipped what students needed most.
Schools became more motivated to update their program information through the partner portal once they saw what richer data was unlocking. The leading indicator was student engagement. Search interactions on grad content jumped 800%+ in Q3 2022. The trailing outcome was business: graduate market share moved from 8% to 17%.
The graduate segment moved from Niche's weakest vertical to one that delivered for both sides of the marketplace, and meaningfully shifted the business's footing in a category we'd been losing.
We doubled market share with what we shipped. The full vision (individual program profile pages) never made it. Leadership pulled the plug on continued investment in the segment shortly after launch, and resources transitioned back to undergrad to build the more robust experience that side of the business needed.
What I'd do differently: invest earlier in the strategic case, not just the design work. By the time the architecture call landed, leadership was weighing infrastructure lift against an unknown ceiling for the segment. A clearer written picture of what grad could be (sized, modeled, presented to the room) might have changed the conversation. Or it wouldn't have. But that was the lever I didn't pull, and it's the one I'd reach for first next time.
What stays with me is the methodology. Leading with research before solutioning is what made the work land. The data did the convincing on every cross-functional decision that mattered, and the eventual scope cut took nothing away from the part that worked.
Fifth Third Bank wanted to build something with AI. That was the extent of the brief. My job was to translate that executive interest into a product with a real purpose, one that solved an actual customer problem rather than demonstrating technical capability for its own sake.
I was positioned for this through my work on the online account opening team. The connection: customers weren't choosing the right financial products for their situation, and nobody was winning because of it.
Data showed most customers weren't taking advantage of products best suited to their financial situation. Managing finances is stressful. People don't always know if they're making the right choices.
I aligned leadership around the emotional framing. This was about helping customers feel confident about their financial future, not just cross-selling products.
The most important early decision was choosing guided conversation over open-ended dialogue. We had a specific first goal: understand the customer well enough to recommend the right products. An unconstrained AI could go anywhere. That wasn't useful yet.
The questions Jeanie needed to ask to understand a customer's situation, and the logic mapping answers to product recommendations.
Clear scope boundaries so the AI stayed on goal. Scope creep in conversational AI creates bad experiences fast.
In the end, Jeanie was a natural language product powered by machine learning, not the open AI the brief had imagined. But it was the right version for the problem we were actually solving.
Defining the right problem when leadership hands you an open directive is harder than it sounds. There's real pressure to build what was asked for. The emotional framing, connecting the product to customer stress, not just product selection, was what made the business case land.
This was also the first time I worked closely with a natural language backend. That technical learning shaped how I think about AI-adjacent products today.
Staff Product Designer and US Army veteran (2007–2015). Ten-plus years shaping digital experiences across education technology and financial services. I specialize in two-sided marketplace design, balancing what users need with what the business requires at the same time.
I start with the problem, not the solution. That sometimes means reframing the brief, pushing back on scope, or running research that changes direction entirely before any wireframes exist. The Army taught me to plan, then adapt under pressure. Both still apply.
Products that work for both sides of a marketplace simultaneously. Systems that hold up at scale. Research that actually changes decisions, not just confirms them. Mentoring designers earlier in their careers.
At Niche, partnering with product leadership to shape strategy before any wireframe gets drawn. Looking for the next place to do that kind of work.