About me
A compassionate human who brings teams together & has a "bot-like" work ethic that generates positive results ...and, occasionally, random trivia.
I'm Shanda and Studio Joonly is my career in a nutshell. With 15 years of experience in Product Development and Advertising, I've been investing my days working on transformational teams in tech startups – big and small.
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My primary goal is to provide a strategic approach to digital products and a human approach to process design, coaching and team growth. I help stakeholders understand the bigger picture and help them to break it down into a tactical roadmap that can be easily implemented.
Personal Philosophy
Happy people are productive people and those people influence positive impact. I believe a healthy team culture and collaboration enables us to produce fast, successful results.
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Why? Because I've seen it in action. I've been fortunate to both, contribute to and build team structures that really thrive by using my design thinking and leadership skills.
Be kind & Care personally
Manage projects & lead people
Act with integrity
Foster growth
in others
Curriculum Vitae in Design Leadership
​During my time at Amboss, I went from Principal Product Designer to Design Lead of the Education Group. This was due to achievements that included:
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Creating a path for design excellence by coaching non-design stakeholders (Head of Customer Support, Sales Leads, Medical Leads, Product Managers, Engineers, Tech Leads and Executives) on the design process, research methods and agile development practices
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Facilitating a foundation for Discovery to Delivery workflows for three product teams within the Group
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Establishing baseline UX metrics with Senior PMs to track and monitor performance on priority features
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Managing direct reports and mentoring designers who were working on horizontal topics related to the product and design strategy ie. JTBDs, User Journeys, Customer Journeys
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Organized design and UX research resources for product teams
​While at Spectrm, I "professionalized collecting customer feedback and conducting user research" (quoted from the CPO & Co-founder). Some of the projects, I'm most proud of are:
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Introducing dual-track agile in product development to integrate user testing in parallel to product planning
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Establishing a User Research process and documentation of customer feedback
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Grooming Sales Leads and Customer Support Managers on how to generate quality insights from customer interactions, which included developing UX Research scripts, survey frameworks and leveraging Intercom tagging to synthesize trends​
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Organizing quarterly strategy off-sites and facilitating design thinking sessions
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Integrating human-centred design principles into product discovery and prioritization
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Creating a design strategy that included developing a Design System through Storybook, Quasar and Apex Charts to streamline the design and product vision
​When working at Babbel, I was able to really exercise and expand my skills on a strategy level. Since I was the Lead Designer for the R&D department that included 3 product offerings, I was responsible for:
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Organizing and facilitating idea sessions, strategy workshops and design sprints for the core company and the R&D department
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Mapping out the product eco-system of the offerings that achieved market fit and profitability by identifying value propositions and aligning them to the right target audiences
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Visualizing the customer life cycle amongst each target audience including the Babbel app's active users by developing personas and segment-based customer journeys for digital marketing
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Integrating a design and research process into product development for two Babbel products by conducting stakeholder interviews and collecting feedback on how to improve their existing workflow​
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Leading collaboration on brand design and product design strategy by creating a user testing roadmaps, competitor analysis and design audits for each product to assess market potential and ideate on brand positioning
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Mentoring PMs and Product Designers on stakeholder management, peer coaching and interpersonal leadership
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Creating the updated career ladder and salary scale for Product Designers to ensure stable growth within the design team (9 members)
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Hiring and managing product designers, both in-house and contract freelancers
​At Crealytics, I was empowered to take on design management duties while working as a Senior UX/UI Designer. Such responsibilities included:
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Leading the design team (5 members including myself) in developing the new art direction of the brand and I was directly responsible for planning and coordinating the tactical roll out of the final rebranding initiative across three countries and four offices
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Developing frameworks for conducting usability and assessment testing in customer interviews​ including a process that enabled Sales, Account Managers, Customer Support and Digital Marketers to sign up for weekly test sessions
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Created foundation for design documentation that includes research reports, design explorations and design system management​