How might we utilize design thinking to unpack client business problems rapidly and translate insights into unique, AI-enabled experiences?

The Role

As an experience designer on IBM’s Client Engineering team, I lead design thinking workshops with cross-functional teams of sellers, engineers, and client executives to uncover a client’s current processes, goals, and challenges. We synthesize those findings to define a project scope that delivers maximum value in a 4-week pilot. During our pilots, I work with the technical team to craft unique user experiences with Figma, test the usability of the minimum viable product through surveys or user interviews, and build presentations to tell the story of the improved user experience and business value. Our tight timelines mean I am agile, flexible, and efficient, ensuring the team stays focused on the user. Our projects range from designing dashboard interfaces to developing risk assessment tools to AI virtual assistants. I work with clients from various industries, including banking, manufacturing, retail, and insurance.

Work from this role is confidential, so the following use cases are anonymized and do not include specific client details. Please reach out with any questions.

Turning Complex, Critical Data into Clear Design

Collaborating with a health-tech startup and a cross-functional team of engineers and founders, I helped design an AI-powered emergency tracking platform to enhance resident safety in nursing homes. To address the fast-paced, high-stress environment of nursing home care, we grounded our design choices entirely in the daily workflows of primary and secondary users. Knowing that caregivers are constantly on their feet, we took a mobile-first approach to give nurses immediate, real-time access to active incidents, using eye-catching animations on high-priority alerts to ensure critical situations are never overlooked. We intentionally kept the main interface sparse and distraction-free, focusing strictly on severity levels and AI-suggested actions for swift decision-making, while building clickable, expandable widgets so users could access deeper resident data on demand without cluttering the screen. Finally, to account for different administrative needs without burdening frontline caregivers, we separated high-level protocol analytics into a dedicated desktop dashboard tailored specifically for facility managers to monitor overall system compliance. Our finalized interactive prototypes received overwhelmingly positive feedback and were immediately used by the client to pitch prospective customers and drive new business opportunities.

Leveraging AI to Streamline Design Workflows

For an upcoming Chicago client workshop, I received a request for a basic registration form. Recognizing that another regional team had used a dedicated landing page, I wanted to deliver a more seamless, brand-aligned experience while testing AI-assisted development workflows. Starting with Figma Make for rapid prototyping, I refined the design before exporting and deploying the code through IBM’s coding assistant. Within 48 hours, I delivered a live, fully responsive event website featuring an automated registration pipeline that synced attendees directly into monday.com and triggered instant confirmation emails via Twilio. This experience catalyzed my integration of AI across my broader design workflow. Today, I leverage AI tools to rapidly synthesize complex workshop data and research insights in Mural, streamline heuristic evaluations, and structure compelling narrative content for presentations.

Lead Projects and Manage Stakeholder Expectations

A real estate management company wanted to partner with IBM to develop new AI-driven products to improve its offerings to clients. I facilitated an in-person design thinking workshop to investigate their offerings and customer experience to generate product ideas that bridge experience gaps. Once use cases were prioritized and one was selected for a pilot, I was appointed project lead and managed expectations, aligning scope, timelines, and deliverables, while overseeing risks and cross‑functional teams to ensure successful project delivery. This role involved coordinating across 8+ teams within IBM and the client to ensure the right people were involved and that we had a solid roadmap to transition the project from pilot to implementation and delivery.

Using Storytelling to Communicate Value and Realign Expectations

An insurance provider had a complicated process for their business units to request data, which included long wait times and an overworked data team, resulting in missed deadlines and fines. Our team created a virtual assistant that enabled business users to self-serve and find information without having to request and wait for the data team. To communicate the value of this updated process, I created storyboards of the current and future states of their process. This highlighted the frustrations in their original process and the improved user experience for both personas when using our virtual assistant. Our presentation received great feedback from our client’s executives and helped us break through to the client and communicate the value of our solution.

Credentials

It’s important to stay educated and constantly be learning. Throughout my time at IBM, I have taken many courses to ensure I stay on top of the market. Below are some relevant badges that I have earned: