UX LEADERSHIP
Team Leadership
Global Website Leadership
Operational Excellence
UX Innovation
Training, mentoring, and developing digital professionals for maximum impact
Accomplishments
Team identity strategy: Transformed my UX team from executors to advisors
When I joined Sartorius as Manager of Digital UX, I found the team building web pages exactly as instructed by campaign and product managers who, by no fault of their own, weren't trained in web best practices, let alone UX principles.
My strategy was to completely flip my team's identity so we could utilize our talents to advocate for the customer. During my first year as a manager I had to change the team mindset, gain the trust of their business partners, and ultimately establish authority as experience advisors.
To achieve this, I trained the team in the following areas:
Standard UX/UI tools: defining the problem and goal, analytics, stakeholder interviews, personas, competitive analysis, wireframes, hi-fidelity mockups, and prototypes
Analytics software: Google Analytics, Hotjar
Communication: Diplomacy, design thinking, persuasion
These new tools provided my team methods to understand stakeholder goals, identify user behavior insights, compare our experience to other industry leaders, and provide UX guidance. It was a labor of love to ease our stakeholders into this new approach, but now they actively approach us for advice on how to create the best web experience.
Career development: UX certifications
Team career development is incredibly important to me so I'm always looking for opportunities to increase my team's skillset.
Continuing with my identity-flip strategy, I decided to have them attending a week-long, virtual Nielsen Norman Group UX conference to level them up by expanding their perception of user experience. Everyone enjoyed the sessions they chose, all of which opened their mind to new design approaches, methodologies, and tools that directly impacted their daily work.
After the conference had concluded, each designer attempted their NN/g UX certification assessments and passed. Team morale had never been higher, and I was proud to have a group of certified UX designers on my team.
Expanded team authority: SEO training & leadership
SEO from the ground up
In 2024, driving organic traffic was Digital Marketing's first priority, and, without the budget for an SEO manager, my team was tapped to drive SEO improvements throughout the website.
My UX designers understood the basics of on-page SEO (URLs, meta titles & descriptions, title hierarchy, and image alt text), but had never been responsible for guiding stakeholders in optimizing marketing content for search engines.
Introducing more advanced SEO skills
As a leader, it was my job to define new SEO methodology by utilizing my own (admittedly limited) knowledge, gain access to SEO monitoring tools, and get my team up to speed.
I quickly developed a framework for the team, which included:
Defining targeted and related keywords
Balancing search volume and keyword difficulty
Competitive SEO analysis
Keyword focus to improve page rankings
Key content to answer frequently searched questions
Structured data (e.g. FAQs) to match Google’s “People also ask...” SERP section
Content hierarchy for maximum conversion
New page topics to draw high-volume keywords
Real organic results
Throughout the year, my team learned to guide campaign and product managers in developing content that would drive the most organic traffic, which resulted in many Sartorius product and application pages ranking withing Google's top 10 (page one) results.
Expanding the team from UX to Digital Experience
Welcoming new digital channels
In late 2025 I was promoted to Head of Digital Experience and Operations (DXO) and expanded my team with DAM, PIM, email, and lead import functions. I went from managing four direct reports to eleven direct reports (5 employees, 2 interns, and 4 contractors).
Leading additional digital marketing channels was a new challenge, and, with more direct reports, my top two priorities were 1) team support and empowerment, and 2) smooth operations.
Team support & empowerment
To maintain team morale during this transition, I scheduled weekly 1:1s with all full-time employees and interns, and monthly 1:1s with contractors. These meetings focused on understanding each role, workload, and offering support to ensure they had access needed tools and resources.
Smooth digital operations
Operational excellence had been a core value of mine managing the UX team, but now I needed to expand it to multiple digital marketing channels. I began by understanding the existing operational process for DAM, PIM, email, and lead import and finding ways to streamline stakeholder touchpoints.
DAM and PIM received requests via many different platforms (Teams, Outlook, Asana, etc.) so I re-rerouted most of these requests through a simple Asana form. This way, most requests were trackable within Asana (our project management platform) which made reporting easy. I then worked with the team to establish SLAs that helped set stakeholder expectations and delivery turnaround times.
This transition also created an opportunity to improve our web operations process, which began with stakeholder and UX team feedback sessions. I was able to gather several process pain points from both teams and implement changes that and improved turnaround times and communication.
