Maven saw an opportunity to bring AI into healthcare but needed an approach that maintained the trust and clinical rigor members expect. I led product definition and design for Ask Maven, an AI experience that combines personalized medical context, access to human experts, and cited responses grounded in vetted clinical content. Launched in just three months, it set a foundation for AI across the Maven platform — with strong early signals in both member retention and response quality.

Early-stage startups face a specific design problem: limited runway, no designer on staff, and urgent pressure to ship differentiating quality on the way to product-market fit. I advised over twenty Sequoia portfolio startups across product/UX, branding, and design hiring — with hands-on co-creation for about half, including Anterior, Claim, Fleet, HealthLeap, Meeno, Mindy, Sutro, and Traversal.

For Reflect Orbital, I partnered with the co-founders to define a minimum viable brand inspired by old NASA patches and Carl Sagan-era posters — executed fast enough to support their funding announcement. The brand drove 3x growth in customer applications within days.

Ampersand — Sequoia's community and knowledge app for founders — had a strong visual foundation but a usage problem: engagement spiked around events and went quiet in between. Not enough pull to make it a habit for busy founders. I drove founder research to identify new bets, then led a full redesign across iOS and responsive web — shipping a newsfeed, founder connection features, interactive tools like a company insights explorer and hiring benchmarks, and a design system spanning both platforms. I also contributed design curriculum to Arc, Sequoia's founder incubator. Collectively these efforts doubled weekly active users and improved NPS.

Millions of first-time vote-by-mail voters in 2020 had no guidance — and the process differed across hundreds of counties. Isabel Tewes and I identified the opportunity over a pandemic Zoom and built a localized instructional app from scratch. I led product design, front-end development, and visual branding; Zac Witte handled back-end, Miki & Gopika Setlur drove social. We set a goal of 100 people voting who otherwise wouldn't have. We think we reached a few thousand.

Dropbox launched Spaces as a collaboration layer built around files, but after launch it wasn't growing organically — usage was uneven and it wasn't a direct answer to what customers were looking for. I joined to direct Spaces and four additional design teams across the core product, then was tapped to lead a full reboot of the Spaces design. I facilitated a strategy workshop with the executive team and ran deep research into small business knowledge workers, using those findings to test value propositions and drive execution. The work established the research and design foundation for what became Dropbox Dash — now the company's primary AI product, embedded across its 700M+ registered user base.

The Social Good org had grown quickly across five teams — Charitable Giving, Crisis Response, Health, Mentorship, and Civic Action — each with inconsistent visual representations. I reconciled fragmented Charitable Giving icon variants into a single unified logo now used extensively across Meta products, drew the Mentorship logo from scratch, and normalized the broader portfolio. I also created a logo for the Social Good team used in press and internal culture. Many of these marks remain in use today.

Across five fast-growing product teams, internal stakeholders were pulling in different directions on how to define impact and choose the most impactful bets. I designed and facilitated a leadership offsite to align on a shared vision — measurable but aspirationally out-of-reach — and a strategy to get there. The portfolio that followed operated at real scale: the Charitable Giving platform has raised over $7 billion for nonprofits globally, and Civic Action tools powered what Meta called the largest voting information campaign in American history.

With five teams shipping independently, core actions and flows were hard to find in predictable places and the products felt disconnected. I led a cross-team design sprint to establish a shared UI language, giving each team a common foundation to move faster within established patterns. The coherence this created contributed to the product outcomes above and improved design velocity across the org.

When I joined as founding designer, Change.org was transitioning from a blog network into a self-serve petition platform — the UX was clunky and there were no growth mechanics to help petitions spread. I grew the design team from 1 to 15, spanning product, communication design, research, and content strategy — and led the rebrand, platform architecture, and primary flow optimization. Those efforts helped 100x petition starters and supporters, with the platform ultimately generating a campaign victory every hour.

Change.org was growing fast but its visual identity wasn't keeping pace with its mission or scale. Working directly with CEO Ben Rattray, I established the brand tenets — timeless, strong, friendly — then directed work across agencies and designers, contributing to symbol selection, palette, and an object-oriented CSS styleguide co-authored with engineering. Change.org became one of the most recognized social impact brands in the world — its visual identity a consistent presence in grassroots campaigns globally. Covered in Brand New. Credit also to agency Instrument and designers Wes Mitchell and Lauren Adams.

Transportation for America needed to move a skeptical, print-native congressional audience on the case for safer streets. I designed their first "Dangerous by Design" reports, synthesizing complex pedestrian fatality data into sharp visualizations with a bold identity built to command attention in a policy context. The report became a cornerstone of T4A's ongoing advocacy — and the 2011 edition prompted Senator Tom Harkin and eleven co-sponsors to introduce the Complete Streets Act within hours of its release, with Harkin citing the report directly on the Senate floor.

The 2008 Obama campaign needed to fund a historic national effort through digital advertising — with no playbook for doing it at scale. I designed the majority of the campaign's online ads, which became its largest donation funnel, raising tens of millions of dollars each month. The work pioneered early A/B testing for political ad design and included the first-ever use of in-video-game ads for a political get-out-the-vote effort.