Hi. I’m Joanna.

I’ve spent nine years leading design at organizations at Chegg, Spectrum, and Electronic Arts supporting the CX, growth, and monetization teams.

Over my 15-year career in design, I've worked at some well-known agencies and brands, including Frog, Razorfish (now Publicis Sapient), and Apple. I thrive in highly complex, ambiguous environments that are digital platforms, product, and service-centric organizations.

When approaching challenges, I combine design thinking, agile methodology, product understanding, and business strategy. I drive a culture of communication, openness, and quality with a healthy dose of optimism and humor. Learn about me or see some work.

  • End-to-end product and service design

  • Cross-functional team leadership and org design

  • Performance and delivery acceleration

  • Human-Centered, Design Thinking

  • Customer experience mapping, research, planning and execution

  • Design system adoption and deployment

  • Operating Model Design

  • Systems Thinking

WORK

  • Mathway Native App Redesign

    Led redesign experience for Chegg Mathway - a native educational calculator for algebra, graphing, and calculus allowing students to understand complex concepts by snapping a photo of their math homework.

    Role: Product Design Director - led the creative vision and output for the product design team, developed design strategies, aligned stakeholders behind the product design vision.

    Timeline: 2022-2023

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  • Subscription Messaging & Discounts

    2.3% CVR lift or $2.6 million dollar financial impact to the Chegg Subscription checkout experience by optimizing the experience focusing on clear messaging, strong yet non-invasive visuals, and an easy way to apply a discount.

    Role: Product Design Director - championing usability testing and analytics, greenlighting changes and improvements to meet product KPIs. Interaction and visual approval, operational management

    Timeline: 2021-2023

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  • Equipment Self-Installation Native App

    Driving company-wide change by demonstrating the power of user data and feedback - decreasing 33% of customer support calls.

    Role: Senior UX Manager - final hiring decisions, delegating tasks, defining timelines, prioritizing work, providing group and individual feedback.

    Timeline: 2018-2020

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  • Information Architecture and Interaction Design Production Work

    My design experience is rooted in IA and interaction design. I’ve produced complex interaction documentation for engineers at Delta Airlines and HP. I’ve also developed complex schematics for an online education CRM system. Beware! This is ‘vintage’ work from design days of yonder!

    Timeline: 2011—2014

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LEADERSHIP

  • Growth & Promotions Mentorship

    Designers are problem solvers. As a design mentor I still get to practice that, but on a more meta-level. I get to solve problems by helping others solve their problems.

    Through regular 1x1s, advocating for design in larger product meetings, and making myself available as much as possible I’ve had multiple reports promoted to the next level of their career.

    The most important part of any mentor relationship is to truly understand your mentee’s goals and what success looks like for them. What is their personal definition of success and what are the next steps to get them there?

  • Full Stack Product Team Director

    As the Omni Team Director I led all search, support, notification and SEO project outcomes for the Self-Service Web team at Charter . This included responsibility for community forums and key chat integrations into Spectrum.net and SpectrumBusiness.net. My team was group of 19 that included not only design, but engineering, product owners, data & analytics, content and research.

    The job required detailed knowledge of our product and outcome, understanding where the customer and industry is going, and how the products must adapt to meet those needs. I identified new projects and priorities, constantly validating that the team is aligned and focused on the right thing at the righ time. I was responsible for the execution and final decisions for all solutions created (including product definition, user experience and information architecture, software design, testing, automation, analytics and instrumentation) I partnered with external organizations to receive input and to build alignment on execution of solutions.

    I served as team coach – elevating team to higher levels of agency and self-efficacy and I created routine communications for executive consumption around roadmap delivery, platform/feature quality and team performance

    Role: Director of Product

    Timeline: 2019-2021

STRATEGY

  • Design Thinking Workshops

    At Charter, a small team of representatives from Product and Design were asked to collaborate on a standard process for upcoming workshops.

    We championed design thinking workshops across the 500-member product organization to foster innovation and collaboration changing the fundamental planning process across the business. This was a part of an incredibly powerful and positive cultural shift that happened at Charter positively impacting our time to market and agile working process.

    Here is a glimpse of some of the workshops I’ve led including clearly understanding the problem to solve, mapping solutions to KPIs, and customer journey mapping.

    Role: Co-founder
    Timeline: 2019

  • Design System Champion

    At Chegg I was a catalyst for change creating visibility around the design system and pulling in multidisciplinary teams of product, design, and engineering owners improving workflow time by an estimated 20% faster after design system adoption.

    Role: Product Design Director

    Timeline: 2021-2023

  • Design System Contributor

    I served as a member of the Spectrum Design Systems. As a part of the team I worked on developing a library of tools used by over 125 resources. We audited our existing components, documented them, and created a company website and sketch component UI Library.

    Role: Senior Contributor - proposed, developed, reviewed and integrated new features including components, patterns, guidelines, bug fixes, and documentation improvements.

    Timeline: 2017-2020

  • Agile Design as Part of the Scrum Lifecycle

    Chegg UX lacked any formal tracking process when I came onboard in 2021. This created prioritization confusion within the design team and timeline uncertainty for stakeholders

    I applied an agile-based design delivery system using the existing Jira tools in place. I then implemented a dual-track discovery/development system aligning design (discovery) sprints with engineering (development) sprints.

    Finally I added designers to daily scrum meetings increasing design visibility and scope understanding. I reduced churn within design team by 60% and overall time to Reduced churn within design team by 60% and overall time to completion rate by 30%.

Testimonials

  • “You helped our team grow and develop in so many ways, Joanna! We were always grounded in our big-picture goals. We knew we had your full support in advocating for the best experience for our students. Thank you for being in our corner.”

    ABBY SANDERS, SR. UX CONTENT DESIGNER AT CHEGG

  • “Your leadership was excellent and pushed us forward to greater heights.”

    ANITA PHANTHIKANE LEAD PRODUCT DESIGNER AT CHEGG

  • “I’ve worked with Joanna for the past 4 years here at charter, first on my team, then as partners as she grew into her leadership roles. I’ve always been impressed with Joanna’s calm, collected approach to problem solving. She is a research-first, data-driven design leader that always understands the balance of the customer’s needs and the goals of the business. Joanna excels at bringing disparate teams together to look at innovative ways to tackle difficult projects with multiple stakeholders–a task that can’t be underestimated in any company. Her demeanor is warm, professional and she has an incredible attitude that is infectious to the teams she is a part of. While Joanna quickly understands the scope of a broad program, she isn’t afraid to dig into the complexities so she can help her team think through simple solutions for complex problems — a great asset to any team”

    PETER BROWN, GROUP VICE PRESIDENT, SERVICE EXPERIENCE AGENCY CHARTER COMMUNICATIONS (SPECTRUM)

  • “Joanna took on a new leadership role during a challenging re-org and lead her team through the complexity and uncertainty of the change with grace and humor. While she reported to me, I appreciated her openness to take on any issue and immerse herself in learning new parts of the business. She was a key role in the success of company-wide initiatives. Her background in product design and UX makes her a unique leader who advocates for the customer while understanding the goals of the business and is able to balance them both.”

    ZACH HENDERSHOT, VICE PRESIDENT, SELF SERVICE PLATFORMS CHARTER COMMUNICATIONS (SPECTRUM)