Innovator + Strategist + Inventor + Designer
Experienced leader at a forward focused organizations leading multidisciplinary teams through a design thinking based innovation process to continuously generate creative and desirable user experiences and new business opportunities, resulting in remarkable business value for the enterprise.
My educational background is in Engineering: Product Design, a multi-disciplinary program offered at Stanford University that is the intersection of Engineering, Design, and Human Values.
My professional background includes 10 years (1996-2006) at IDEO, an international consultancy helping organizations innovate through a human-centered design process. I was Co-Founder and Director of the Zero20 Practice which handled all youth-related (zero to twenty years old) design and innovation programs for clients such as Procter & Gamble (Pampers Brand), Electronic Arts and LeapFrog. The Zero20 Practice actually evolved out of a Palo Alto, CA start-up called Skyline Products which was a toy/game/juvenile product invention and licensing firm that was founded in 1994 by partners, Brendan Boyle and Fern Mandelbaum. I joined Skyline Products initially as an intern in 1996 while I was still studying at Stanford, continued working as a contractor almost full-time while in school, and then became their first employee when I graduated in 1998. In 1998 Brendan and Fern sold Skyline Products to IDEO. Brendan and I continued to run and grow Skyline as an independent Studio within IDEO. With increased financial support from IDEO, we grew our team to include a multi-disciplinary crew of mechanical/electrical/software engineers, industrial/graphic/interactive designers, model makers, technologists, writers, and artists. As we continued to direct our speculative invention/licensing program we also began to apply our kid design experience to take on kid-centric consulting projects for clients like Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo. To date, this group is recognized in the Toy and Game industry as one of the leading invention/licensing groups in the country. In addition to my role as Zero20 Practice Lead, I was also involved with the “IDEO-U, Innovation Workshop” program which designed, produced and facilitated workshops to train managers at companies in IDEO’s brand of human-centered innovation methodology.
The next three years of my professional journey was spent exploring a completely new domain: Banking. In 2006 I was hired into Bank of America to help design and execute a business transformation program for the Global Treasury Services organization within the Global Corporate and Investment Bank. Within this role, I was able to apply my background in human-centered design thinking approach to a new context to gain deeper insights into client needs and inspire cross-disciplinary collaboration to create innovations in business process, technology and client experience. My role at the bank then evolved into a position where I engaged 5000+ global associates to collaborate more effectively, experiment to invent solutions to their own/client facing challenges, and where I generally designed, built, launched & managed various programs, channels and initiatives to drive overall business performance through “Associate Engagement.”
My current role is in another new and exciting domain that I have had no previous experience in: Retail Loss Prevention. As Director of Product Marketing for the Secure Fixtures product category at InVue Security Products I am in a leadership role where I am continuously inventing and managing an aggressively balanced portfolio of revolutionary, evolutionary and incremental product innovations that enable global retail clients to increase their bottom lines by simultaneously reducing theft of their merchandise while also increasing sales.