Welcome! I’m sure you’re dying to know more about the person behind this little blog. 😃
A Disclaimer:
My husband and I both work full time. I have two babies and two dogs. Spending time and being truly present with my family is incredibly important to me. If you’re looking for perfectly staged, over the top, Pinterest-perfect depictions of people pretending to live in bliss…you might want to move along. (Read: No bottles of San Pellegrino water casually perched on my counters, suggestions to store cereal in beautiful glass jars, or Instagram outfit pics of me “running errands” in high heels. 🙂
However, if your curiosity is even a little piqued by the topics below, I’d love for you to sign up and come along for the ride. Follow as I work with my husband to renovate our third home, pursue a house to flip on the side, attempt to “kill it” at work (designing & building software in the healthcare space), and “crush it” at home (keeping all my humans happy, healthy, loved, and fulfilled). Those phrases are in imaginary air quotes because, well, there’s no way I could say that with a straight face. Don’t get me wrong, I have my streaks of brilliance where I feel like a bad ass professional, mom-of-the-year, or visionary artist…but we all know it’s *effing* impossible to be everything to everyone all the time. Hang in while I do my best, and I’ll pass along lessons learned, helpful tips/products/technology/strategies, maybe a little inspiration, and a glimpse into this messy, beautiful thing that is my life.
The stuff I love to do:
Solve problems through design & creative thinking.
The space where my passions and skills align. I love figuring out ways to bring order to chaos. I truly believe design goes so much deeper than “looking pretty” and I love designing better processes, effective user interfaces, functional living/workspaces, etc. while keeping practicality and ROI in focus.
Craft engaging experiences.
This could mean a lot of things to different people. For me, I apply it as intentionally making the simple things special.
Balance practicality, style, functionality, & budget.
Knowing when to be fanatic down to the last minute detail vs. calling it when “good” is “good enough”.
Topics In My Zone:
– Home decor & design
– Technology—App/software design and usability
– Product Design
– Parenting/Life Hacks
Me, IRL:
Career:
I’m the Director of Internal Product & Customer Experience at a software company in the healthcare space. For anyone unfamiliar with software for the healthcare industry (or the healthcare industry in general…), classifying it as a ‘hot mess’ is an understatement. Technology was rather late to this sector—and mostly treated as an afterthought. Poor design and horrendous user experience, matched alongside the complex, often counterintuitive nature of the industry in general has landed us where we are today: enterprise software that healthcare companies pay millions of dollars for, yet often cause more problems than they solve and frustrate all users that are forced to interact with them. And therein lies the opportunity where I find joy and purpose in my work.
Luckily I work for a company that thinks a little differently. We build software in the healthcare space that doesn’t look, act, or feel like software from the healthcare space. I work every day to use technology and design to solve real problems, and strive to do it in a way that delights my users.
Home:
There is an obvious correlation between the things that bring me joy at work and the type of projects I love to get tangled up in at home. It makes me light up to look at something outdated, nonfunctional, run down, or just downright ugly and start devising a plan to make it better. I take pride in finding creative ways to save money without sacrificing style–Partly because I was raised by thrifty parents without much money, partly because I’m hyper focused on ROI, and partly because my project wish list is always deeper than my budget.
My husband and I are currently renovating our 3rd home together. We do almost all the work ourselves and truly enjoy the process of working through it together (except, of course, during that special point of any big project when we’re ready to strangle each other 😃) We have two pretty adorable baby boys and two crazy rescue dogs.
