Work: Yahoo!

I joined Yahoo after having been the Creative Director at Hightail for two years. Yahoo was in a process of rebranding all of their products, and the idea of owning that, along with working with a great team was remarkably appealing. I was brought in primarily to be the design lead for Yahoo Mail, but my role grew to eventually own all products in the Comms stable: Mail, Messenger, Flickr, and Yahoo Search.

Along with the multitude of projects I oversaw at Yahoo, I spent a fair amount of time driving culture growth through teaching, coaching, and mentorship. I authored a "How we work" document that covered a multitude of topics including values, principles, a definition of good design, communication frameworks for working with PM and engineering teams, a Sketch design systems library, and a design review cadences. Feel free to read through the entire document for a clearer view of how I liked to structure the craft process of the team. I also taught my team how to better prototype and sell their ideas through the use of Protopie and After Effects as a means of showcasing complete ideas.

My time also included planned coaching and mentorship of many young designers who were participating in our Design Associates Program. The program targeted young designers straight out of college and gave them planned projects that they could focus on for a full year. Each project had dedicated launch targets and the designers were coached through the entire design, engineering, and launch cycle.

My final contribution was a reboot of the Oath (Yahoo + Aol) Design Council. Along with the other co-lead of the Design Council, we planned and executed new ways to grow the culture of the design org across all of the Yahoo properties, including monthly get togethers, design reviews, newsletters (that I helped author each week), and quarterly meetings that allowed each Yahoo property to celebrate their wins.