Guiding teams to deliver experiences which delight audiences and exceed business expectations.
Approach
My work spans the product design life-cycle from defining & creating strong conceptual foundations to pixel perfect delivery. I bring:
- Deep empathy, insatiable curiosity, intellectual rigor and an enduring fascination for human motivation
- Bias for action & rapid experimentation delivering just enough design to validate assumptions & get moving quickly, then quickly scaling to design excellence
- Flexible collaborative style leading from behind, beside or in front according to project and team need
Design philosophy
I aspire to create products which are:
- Simple easy and delightful to use
- Authentic & impactful addressing a need and honestly solving it
- Unobtrusive best design is invisible
Collaboration & Leadership
As a cross-functional collaborator, I forge and enjoy strong trusted relationships with my product triad. I am inclusive and believe that we are stronger collectively and work to ensure that whole team is invested and engaged. I’m a powerful influencer at all levels and passionate customer advocate.
As a manager, I care personally about my team and bring fun, social warmth and community to a group along with a strong sense of when to guide, coach or lead. As a design lead, I understand when to balance individuals growth opportunities with project delivery needs.
I have loved partnering with Kirsten over the past 3 years and found her to be an invaluable member of the team. She developed an incredibly strong understanding of our customers’ needs and championed their interests every day and influenced every major decision across product and marketing. Together, we launched several game changing new offerings that I am incredibly proud of.
Rania Succar Business Leader,
QuickBooks Capital and Payments at Intuit
Kirsten has been an amazing design leader, manager, and role model for our QuickBooks Capital team. She leads by example not only with the mastery of her design craft, but more importantly in the way that she is able to identify true customer problems and tackle them with design strategy. Kirsten managed me directly but was much more of a coach/mentor who contributed significantly to my growth as a designer. I’m extremely grateful to have had the chance to work with Kirsten.
Brandon Lee Product Designer at Intuit
Kirsten leads user experience design with customer empathy, data, and vision. Under her leadership, QuickBooks Capital evolved into one of the most delightful products from Intuit, with NPS scores of 80+. Designing for a lending product is incredibly challenging given the confusing and complex nature of small business lending, but Kirsten is a master at distilling the essence of what customers need to know to make a lending decision. Kirsten regularly collects feedback to continue evolving the product and she is incredibly passionate about her work—if given the opportunity, I would work with her again.
Ling Lin Product Manager at Google
I am passionate about harnessing technology to radically enhance and enable human experience and am drawn to high priority arenas such as health, citizenship and wealth and take great satisfaction in bringing simplicity, ease and delight to complex domains.
Outside of work I am an active sailor and love getting out in the brisk breezes of the beautiful San Francisco Bay.