A full-stack design ninja and a mindful team lead.
I love accelerating everyone around me, building strategic partnerships, and creating a sense of belonging and team pride. I love to dream big and to develop creative solutions to solve highly technical problems. My natural curiosity and exuberance enable me to deliver compelling experiences that help people better relate to the world. Currently, I am at Microsoft as a senior design lead working on the cutting edge of AR, VR, and IoT.
SUPERPOWERS
Radiate positive energy! Accelerating everyone around me, effortlessly building deep and enduring partnerships across disciplines and teams, creating a sense of belonging and team pride!
Navigating through highly technical problem spaces, getting to the fundamentals of how things work, and figuring out the right problem to solve.
Breaking through obstacles and marching for the best possible result with an iterative mindset and determination to achieve goals.
Ferociously onboard in a new domain and find clarity in the ambiguity. Rapidly find areas for impact and generate quick wins.
Ability to easily move from detailed work on a specific project to generalization of that work to scale the impact across other people and teams.
Full-stack designer. Able to jump in wherever support is needed. Comfortable and capable across the whole design lifecycle.
EXPERIENCE HIGHLIGHTS
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May 2021-Current
Impact:
-Shaped the overall story and built the key artifacts that became the Build ‘21 Keynote. The keynote (delivered by Satya Nadella/Sam George) introduced Microsoft’s vision for the Metaverse and how technology and products from across the company will come together to deliver on it.-Developed customer journey maps in partnership with engineering and PM in order to create clarity and alignment within the team. These artifacts create a mental framework for understanding both the current product’s capabilities and the unmet customer needs. The framework organized all existing customer research and identifies areas that require future investigation. The approach was then generalized and was used across the division to provide similar artifacts for all of the products in the IoT portfolio.
-Authored proposal for strategic funding requests which included an approach to operationalizing the IoT parts of the Metaverse vision and identification of integration opportunities between Azure Digital Twin and IoT Platform, Connected Spaces, and Mixed Reality.
Learned:
-Ability to tailor my message and take feedback from people at very different levels within the company from IC engineers all the way up to the CEO.
-No doesn’t have to be the end of the discussion. I learned to look at “no” as an opportunity to refine my thinking, negotiate, and generate excitement for my ideas.
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Oct 2020- May 2021
Impact:
-Developed a two-year vision on a key feature area that enabled the engineering team to move from a reactive approach to feature prioritization/design to a more strategic approach by leveraging a lightweight, design-led, highly collaborative approach. Fundamentally changed the way feature crews build features based on a reproducible blueprint that was generalized from the above feature design work. This approach was adopted by the whole UX feature team and was leveraged to coach PMs on best practices in feature development. Key insights that drove a new information architecture, the redesign of multiple key features, and increased understanding of the competitive landscape by all disciplines within the product team based on competitive research and analysis.
-Developed customer journey map that created clarity and understanding (and was later used as a core part of employee on-boarding) for engineering, PM, and design after only one month on the team.
Learning:
-The approach to understanding customers in a developer/platform space requires different skills and approaches.
-The requirements and what constitutes “good UX” are very different in a user-facing application and a developer-facing platform. How to develop empathy for developers versus end-users.
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April-Aug 2020
Impact:
-Reduced engineering churn, validated product vision, and informed new product information architecture by engaging in customer inquiry, synthesizing existing research, and validating customer scenarios/mental models.
-Delivered five customer personas, proposed persona-based information architecture, and high quality/fidelity assets used to communicate user personas, scenarios, information architecture, and customer workflows.
Learning:
-Quickly ramped up on IoT technology and market.
-How to effectively lead in a highly ambiguous space with many executive stakeholders with diverse and often conflicting points of view.
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Mar 2019 -Apr 2020
Impact:
-Secured funding from peer organizations to partner on bringing Mixed Reality to Warehouse management and optimization.
-Delivered a proof of concept to show that Mixed Reality can be effectively leveraged to solve real-world retail, manufacturing, and warehouse problems customers are facing in the areas of efficiency, accuracy, productivity, and safety.
Learning:
-How to effectively translate business priorities into design priorities, and create work for the team that is exciting, with clarity, and aligned with each designer’s interest, passion, and skillset.
-There is a gap between what MR can do and what people think it can do. Small incremental steps can enable closing this perception gap.
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Apr 2018-Apr 2019
Impact:
-Increased subscriptions and HoloLens device sales by developing a series of spatial measurement tools that enabled enterprise customers to leverage HoloLens devices to perform high-precision industrial measurement as part of space planning and to validate and design improved safety protocols. Spatial measurement tools unblocked a large-scale purchase of HoloLens by Toyota.
-Leveraged product learnings to proactively influence peer organizations’ product roadmap.
Learning:
-How to differentiate the root problem from the perceived/articulated customer problems.
-How to tailor my approach in working with a very diverse set of personalities and to make sure everyone felt a sense of ownership.
-Soften my ego in order to achieve the collection team objectives.
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Impact:
-Enabled users that were unfamiliar with 3D technology to easily use our mobile AR application by implementing a real-time visual feedback system aimed at user education. This enabled users to effectively use our application with no experience or training thus increasing the addressable market, decreasing support costs, and increasing customer satisfaction.
Learning:
-The key to working through ambiguity is to have a deep understanding of technology and its boundaries until I can simplify it enough that I can teach my 82 years old grandma.
-We can maximize our superpowers by working as a team.
-Enhance innovation and collaboration across all disciplines by talking in the engineer and PM’s language.
MY STORIES
2017 Joined at Microsoft, was promoted to Senior lead in 2 years.
2017 Graduate NYU - Masters in HCI, Published Top Paper at HCII 2016.
2014 Undergraduate Shanghai Jiaotong University, Top 5%, Full Scholarship, B.E Industrial Design
2014 Imagine Cup - Imagine World - 1st Place China Champion
2013 Imagine Cup - Azure Challenge -Worldwide 3rd Place
Outside work, I am a licensed solo skydiver. I am drawn to fluffy animals. I like reading and sketching my life.