Human-Centered Design, Product Management, Business Strategy
Fueled by a passion for innovation, design thinking, and sustainability, Nicole has led projects for organizations ranging from startup to Fortune 50 across fashion, retail, healthcare, finance, travel, manufacturing, and the social sector.
With her empathetic design sense, technical acumen, and bias for action, she has a knack for dissecting complex problems, creating collaborative cultures, and delivering user-centered solutions.
Areas of Expertise
• Leadership: Lead highly collaborative, multidisciplinary teams through intricate and often ambiguous projects. Provide coaching, enable growth and development, and resolve blockers.
• Design Strategy: Conduct qualitative and quantitative user research and lean experiments to translate insights into opportunity areas, journey maps, and user experiences.
• Product Management: Define, deliver, and validate products/services. Create vision, roadmap, feature sets, requirements/user stories, and key metrics.
• Business Strategy: Conduct competitive, market, and technology trend analysis. Define value proposition and brand strategy, and create compelling storytelling narratives.
• Facilitation: Design and lead workshops and activities to guide groups through design thinking, behavioral design, product development, and collaboration methodologies.
• Project Management: Run agile sprints, and manage project scope, prioritization, delivery timeline, and budget. Manage cross-functional workstreams to ensure quality execution.
• Technical Acuity: Quickly get up to speed on complex systems, devise solutions for challenging problems, and clearly articulate to non-technical audiences.
• Client Partnerships: Build relationships with senior management to define strategic vision and create business value. Create and conduct executive-level presentations.
• Organization & Culture: Plan, implement, and assess impact of digital transformation, organizational design, change management, processes/workflows, and cultural norms/ceremonies.
SELECTED CLIENT PROJECTS:
Global Financial Services Company
Data science competition platform for crowd sourcing machine learning models that improve financial predictions
- Led planning, development, and launch of MVP including new user interface design and stabilization of back-end platform
- Managed delivery of senior leadership demo, which was key to gaining internal buy-in for the continuation of the project
- Introduced and led organization design effort, implementing new organizational structure, processes, and culture to effectively bring previously silo-ed team together to work collaboratively
International Philanthropic Foundation
End-to-end solution to revolutionize the creation, management, and tracking of investment grants and contracts
- Conducted user research with internal and external stakeholders across 26 different workflows, synthesizing insights into themes, transforming into four streamlined flows
- Led product definition, mapping complex information architecture from legacy systems into new product modules, data models, and screen flow/UX construct
- Trained mirrored client team on innovation frameworks and techniques
One Drop
Subscription B2C ecommerce site and B2B partner program for diabetes management platform
- Introduced and implemented strategic design thinking and product management methodology to inform and validate company vision and product direction, and increase cohesion of ecosystem
- Planned and led multi-day innovation summits to map out customer journeys, identify opportunities, and create product/service roadmap
- Led design, development, and launch of site overhaul to simplify consumer offering, increase transparency, and reduce friction, to improve engagement and conversion
Financial Services Company
Machine learning news platform for risk management professionals to mitigate the impact of news on portfolios
- Led PoC incubation phase of highly complex data science project including a mobile application, web application, and back-end architecture
- Implemented critical features such as a machine learning feedback loop and significant improvements to data quality and user interface
- Planned and managed live pilot with five global financial institutions, gathering key user feedback and testing established hypotheses
Industrial Goods Manufacturer
Two-sided B2B marketplace matching engineers and procurement professionals with materials and suppliers
- Led incubation planning including product definition, venture setup, and technical solution
- Feature set included intuitive search that simplified discovery of materials based on properties
- Conducted workshops and user research to ideate innovative features for product roadmap
Data Privacy Startup
Innovation sprint for nascent start-up seeking product direction
- Conducted and synthesized user, market, and data research to identify opportunities
- Planned and facilitated ideation workshop to brainstorm concepts and define company values
- Developed roadmap for creating, testing, and iterating lean prototypes to quickly validate concepts
Airline Alliance
API platform enabling carriers to exchange interline data via integrations with native airline apps and web services.
- Led PoC phase of back-end platform and front-end reference app development, demonstrating interline journey between first two carriers
- Managed weekly sprints, bringing clarity, organization, and mentorship into a highly ambiguous project with constant pivots
- Planned international developer summit to align on technical, regulatory, and operational considerations and pave the way forward for integration across all carriers
Target
Innovation sprint to identity and prioritize opportunity areas for reinventing the future of retail. Ideation, concept refinement, and "Shark Tank" style executive pitches
Brooks Brothers
Designed and implemented a product lifecycle management system including integrations with an enterprise resource planning system and material and product testing database, rolled-out to entire global merchandising, design, development, and production teams and vendors
Fashionware
Product director of fashion product development system for for small to medium-sized fashion companies that streamlines the design process, facilitates the creation and sending of tech packs, and allows internal users and teams to easily collaborate in real time with suppliers, customers, and manufacturers.
Zafu
Product consultant for machine-learning ecommerce analytics platforms that recommends optimization strategies across SKUs based on fit and style for major retailers and brands
ALDO
Designed and implemented enterprise SaaS product to support a new direct sourcing initiative for footwear and accessories, including features to manage design concepts, merchandise plans, color and raw material libraries, product specifications and costing, sample requests, and integrations with a merchandising system and vendor compliance database
Theory
Strategic product development consultant to improve operational and development efficiencies and increase innovation in the New York sample development center and the overall design, development, and production process
Inclosia Solutions
Product development consultant for enclosures and packaging of electronic devices and cosmetic goods, producing comprehensive trend reports, including market and ethnographic research, internationally sourced materials, and product renderings created in partnership with an industrial designer
