The director of Chase Business hired me to improve how design work ran — intake, scoping, estimation, prioritization, project plans, and capacity planning. My scrum background was the draw, and the Assistant Design Director title reflected it. I accepted it as a UX design role — and didn’t realize how much would be administrative process work rather than the design-strategy leadership I thought I’d signed up for — so I pushed to do both: first IC design, then strategy.

After a run of successful deliverables — and once I’d made clear that this process work (today’s “design ops”) was only part of what I wanted — I took on integrating Merchant Services into Chase Business Online, and grew into Head of UX for that line of business, with a team — and my scope grew from there as the org itself grew into more domains. It set the shape of most of my career since: a hybrid leader of both design management and program management, rather than one or the other.

Running the program and process was the gap the director most needed filled — though he hired me for my UX experience too. Intake, scoping, estimation, prioritization, project plans, and capacity planning, on a scrum and agile foundation and a belief that even design can be agile: it felt administrative at the time, but it was really the start of the operating practice I run today.

This wasn’t applying a known playbook — it was building one in place. The group were business analysts who wrote banking requirements, not software-delivery specialists, inside a bank that had just gone from almost no digital footprint to digital driving real revenue — and a rush to build. Introducing intake, estimation, and agile meant teaching the discipline, not just running it.

So I didn’t impose it. I introduced each piece as the pain showed — the lesson I’d learned watching my first startup’s CTO roll out agile one method at a time — which is how a skeptical group came to adopt a way of working they’d resisted on day one.

In that first part of the year — before “design ops” was a role — this is the concrete work I put in place for the group:

The practice earned trust; the craft is what I was tested on. My first deliverable was a service-plan redesign — a dense pricing-and-features comparison made scannable with progressive disclosure — and I built it myself in clean front-end code.

Then the first homepage dashboard — really a content-strategy and information-architecture problem. Every feature, widget, and ingress became a card we organized, tested, and debated with the LOBs; user testing settled the hierarchy into a system (a main column of the data customers come for, a right column of business real estate still useful to them).

Alongside this I took on leading design systems for my Business team — auditing the application for where patterns weren’t serving business users, and becoming the team’s go-to for systems and accessibility (one of a select few trained to review and approve it across Chase Business). The accounts page is where it came together: I turned a static page into a working tool — filtering, a density toggle, clickable tiles — and built the interactions myself to prove “too costly” wasn’t true. That usability-and-systems advocacy is what clicked into the Merchant Services integration, and earned me Head of UX, Merchant Services.

The dashboard and accounts work became a system adopted across Chase’s lines of business, and the display-priority work matured into formal governance. That body of work earned me my own line of business — Head of UX, Merchant Services — the first of the promotions that followed as the org kept growing. (The arc above traces where it went.)

Each of these is its own case — and each traces back to the front door, the dashboard system, and the practice built here.