Kristen Sheppard

Please contact me via LinkedIn for my full resume.

Bio

Kristen is an entrepreneurial, experience design oriented leader with +10 years experience in experience design, and digital product and technology strategy. She is a realistic optimist and creative leader who delivers impactful and strategic outcomes.

She does this by fostering strategic alignment and cultivating the right environment for teams to do their best work. She has been successful in these endeavors because of her ability to learn, adapt to changing context, and attention to detail.

Her blended background of technology operations, experience design, and strategy as well as maintaining practitioner skillsets, allows her to bounce between going deep and staying high level depending on the audience. She is motivated by the mission of creating positive change through design and technology, and enjoys collaborating with diverse and talented teams to achieve this goal.

Areas of Expertise

Design Thinking | User-centered Design | Business Model Canvas | Value Proposition Canvas | Prototyping in Figma | Generative and Evaluative Testing | Team Leadership | Innovation Management | Design Systems | Jira | OKRs | SAFe Lean | Portfolio Management | Digital Strategy | Facilitation | Change Management | Organizational Culture

Johnson Controls

Senior Director, Global Experience Design

Led an emerging experience design team facing product scaling challenges and low UX maturity in organization, and implemented strategies that improved key areas of the product design while mitigating process inefficiencies to improve speed to market. Examples of these strategies include:

• Redesigning the team's engagement structure to better align designers to supported products creating a transparent view of support costs attributable to the team
  [See more design ops examples]
• Building and launching career pathways for experience designers at the company as a part of the enterprise job catalog to enable clear career progression for designers
  [See more design ops examples]
• Led global generative research study that established an experience model for core customer personas of flagship digital product and led redesign of product suite to modernize user experience with projections of $XXX ARR from increased sales and retention rate
  [Go to portfolio project]

Director, Software Strategy & Transformation

Established a strong foundation for newly formed software engineering organization by baselining the global footprint, rationalizing job families, developing org norms with leadership and shared to +2500 organization, rolling out Objectives and Key Results to communicate vision and future organizational direction, and establish a framework for common strategic vision to rally the software and hardware engineering teams around.

TD Ameritrade

Senior Manager, Empowered Culture & Alignment

Led a team focused on enabling organizational capabilities to embrace a portfolio mindset and build better products faster. Part of this strategy included strengthening and maturing the empowered culture movement at TD Ameritrade and in one year achieved a 7% increase in the organization’s overall empowerment level.

Chief of Staff, Office of the CIO

Identified as a high potential leader by the CIO and executive team for a one year executive development assignment to gain broader business exposure and senior leadership development experience.

Researcher & Developer, Exploration Lab [X Lab]

Served as human-computer interaction expert on research and development team, which worked as an internal incubator, and grew into program management responsibilities. Pitched proofs of concepts to product management for ‘exits’ to product roadmaps and evangelized emerging technology portfolio.

Additional Relevant Experience

• The Broke App, Co-Founder, Ann Arbor, MI:
  +200 interviews, ~$20K raised in funding. Prototyped MVP in Sketch and developed MVP in Swift.
• Government of Spain, Language & Culture Assistant, Madrid, ES:
  Designed lesson plans to engage audience (children aged 5-9) during classes & improved communication skills by learning to rephrase, focus on most important points, and clarify complex ideas.
• Google, Account Associate for Small & Medium Businesses, Ann Arbor, MI:
  Managed portfolio of clients representing $500,000 to +$2 million in revenue each quarter and advised on client sales and marketing campaigns through Google AdWords platform achieving 100% customer satisfaction levels.

Education

Masters of Science (MS), Information, Focuses in Human Computer Interaction and Entrepreneurship
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Comparative Cultures & Politics, Specializations in International Development and Latin American Studies
Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI

Certifications

Distinctions & Awards