Led a cross-functional team to redefine how customers build mobile applications by designing tools that reduce development effort, increase adoption, and open new opportunities for growth.

My role and responsibilities

As the Director of UX, I was responsible for setting the vision for Mobile Builder and ensuring the design direction aligned with the company's broader platform strategy. I partnered closely with a principal architect to shape the technical foundation and define what a scalable, customer-focused builder experience could look like. My focus was on creating an environment where designers could take initiative, collaborate across teams, and feel true ownership over their work. I also worked directly with leadership to communicate design concepts, demonstrate prototypes, and advocate for the impact of user experience in shaping the product's direction.

Leading execution

The Mobile Builder project set out to empower customers to create and customize their own applications without relying on heavy development resources. This work was part of a larger two-month sprint initiated by an EVP to reimagine the platform and explore new paths for customer growth. While multiple teams contributed proposals, the Mobile organization was the only group to deliver both a strategic vision and a working prototype within the sprint.

To bring the Mobile Builder vision to life, I guided the team through a structured, collaborative design process that balanced speed, alignment, and quality. Each stage built on the last, ensuring we moved efficiently from concept to a working prototype that could be evaluated by executive leadership.

1. Define the customer journey — I partnered with Product and Engineering to map the end-to-end customer journey, identifying key pain points and opportunities for innovation. This early alignment with leadership helped ensure the team's direction supported both customer needs and business goals.

2. Translate the journey into wireframes — Working closely with Product, we moved from journey maps to low-fidelity wireframes that visualized the core experience. We used these early artifacts to validate assumptions and align with leadership before investing in higher-fidelity design.

3. Advance to high-fidelity mockups — With the structure in place, the team collaborated with Research and Product to bring the experience to life through detailed mockups. We conducted focused research to study existing patterns, clarify the value proposition, and prioritize the most critical features for launch.

4. Build and share the working prototype — Once the designs were validated, the team built a coded prototype that demonstrated the end-to-end experience. We presented it to executive leadership to gain alignment and prepare for a pilot launch, showcasing how the Mobile Builder could redefine how customers create applications on the platform.

True execution required more than planning; it required alignment. I created a framework that brought together teams across the mobile organization, influenced leadership to strengthen our design capacity, and gave emerging talent the space to lead. It became the structure that transformed vision into momentum.

A framework for building vision and alignment

This framework represents how I guide teams from high-level strategy to aligned execution. It begins with establishing clear strategic priorities and translating them into a focused plan that is communicated across disciplines. From there, I align team and product goals to ensure every designer understands how their work connects to business objectives, creating momentum, clarity, and shared ownership throughout the process.

Strategic priorities

The first step was to define clear priorities and ensure alignment across leadership. I presented the team's vision to the Product SVP to validate that our goals supported the broader company strategy. Through those conversations, I discovered that several projects within the mobile organization were beginning to converge toward a similar outcome.

To succeed, we needed to connect three separate pillars of the mobile organization that had previously worked in parallel. The Mobile Platform team owned the SDK and core infrastructure. The Mobile Publisher team managed app distribution into the App Store and Google Play. The Mobile App team owned the component library and in-app experience. By combining these capabilities under a shared vision, we could create something greater than any single team could build alone: a true mobile app builder.

Strategic plan

To move from aligned priorities to action, we needed to bring the three mobile pillars together into a single, coordinated effort. Each pillar had its own design, product, and engineering functions, but none could achieve the full vision independently. Success depended on creating shared ownership across all disciplines.

I began by reorganizing the UX team to better support this unified approach. Pillar 1 had two designers, Pillar 2 had two designers, and Pillar 3 required additional coverage to scale. I worked with UX leadership to secure additional headcount, ensuring each pillar could contribute equally to the Mobile Builder initiative.

At the same time, one designer expressed interest in taking on more leadership responsibility. After assessing both their skill and motivation, I delegated ownership of product cohesion and provided ongoing coaching to help them grow into the role.

This structure gave the team clearer focus and accountability while creating space for leadership development within the group.

Communicating and collaborating across functions

Bringing together three pillars required establishing a strong rhythm of communication between design, product, and engineering. To maintain alignment, I created two bi-weekly meeting tracks: one for leadership and one for individual contributors. Leadership meetings focused on resource planning, milestones, and key deliverables to ensure strategic alignment and executive visibility, while individual contributor meetings emphasized progress, cross-team collaboration, and demo sessions for sharing work and gathering feedback.

This structure kept communication focused and purposeful. Leaders remained aligned on strategy while contributors stayed connected through collaboration and iteration. The result was greater clarity across roles, stronger cohesion between teams, and a shared sense of ownership that drove the success of Mobile Builder.

Team and product goals

Once communication rhythms were established, I worked closely with product management and engineering leadership to define a shared set of goals that balanced team growth with product outcomes.

Team goals. Our short-term focus was to strengthen the team dynamic by increasing morale, creativity, collaboration, and camaraderie — re-energizing the group after a recent reorg and setting the tone for open, cross-functional problem-solving. In the long-term, our goal was to deepen ownership, impact, awareness, and influence. We wanted designers to feel empowered to make decisions, to see the effect of their work, and to shape product direction with confidence.

Product goals. On the product side, the short-term focus was alignment — combining expertise across three pillars, establishing a clear vision, and producing a working demonstration to inspire confidence in leadership. The long-term goals were cohesion, increased revenue, attracting new customers, and driving innovation. Together, these outcomes would transform Mobile Builder from an experimental concept into a scalable product with lasting business value.

Organizing an alignment workshop

With clear goals in place, the next step was to align leadership across all three mobile pillars. I organized a half-day workshop that brought together design, product, and engineering leaders to uncover obstacles, build shared understanding, and agree on a unified vision for Mobile Builder.

The workshop was structured around a series of collaborative activities that encouraged both creative thinking and practical planning. Leaders broke into smaller groups to explore what an ideal mobile app creation experience should look like for customers, focusing on usability, scalability, and business impact. These sessions helped surface differing assumptions and merge them into a shared product vision. We also collaborated on defining a realistic delivery path, breaking the initiative into three distinct phases that balanced ambition with feasibility.

To make collaboration even more engaging, I hired an external illustrator to create custom visuals for the team — including the featured image at the top of this case study and a set of Google Meet backgrounds. Designers, product managers, and engineers each had a unique background that represented their role, making it easy to identify who was speaking during remote calls. This design touch broke down barriers, helped people quickly build familiarity across teams, and added a sense of shared identity and fun to the process.

By the end of the session, the group had a clear roadmap, renewed alignment, and a collective sense of ownership over how the Mobile Builder vision would come to life.

Influencing the mobile organization

The Mobile Builder initiative became a model for how design, product, and engineering could collaborate to move quickly from concept to working software. By creating opportunities for design input early in the engineering process, the team shaped technical decisions that improved usability and cohesion. The result was a high-quality prototype that made the vision tangible and inspired confidence among stakeholders.

Once the prototype was aligned and validated, the engineering team rapidly transformed it into a functioning demo. This working build showcased the potential of Mobile Builder in action and allowed us to present a compelling proof of concept to the Product EVP.

The success of this initiative extended beyond the project itself. Teams across the company began reaching out to learn from our process, using Mobile Builder as an example of how strategic collaboration and strong design leadership can accelerate innovation. As Salesforce's Chief Design Officer put it, "Yes! More of this!"

This project reflected every aspect of my leadership approach — from setting a clear vision to building alignment across disciplines and empowering others to take ownership. I guided the team from strategy to execution, balancing creativity with accountability and fostering an environment where collaboration could thrive. The result was a working prototype that united design, product, and engineering, increased team morale and creativity, and set the foundation for a product projected to generate $100 million in revenue over five years.