I lead design by balancing craft, strategy, and accountability. My focus is on deeply understanding users, aligning teams around shared goals, and delivering high-quality products that are both thoughtful and practical. I care deeply about details, consistency, and execution—but equally about trust, reliability, and showing up for my team when challenges arise.
Business & craft impact
My impact extends beyond design execution into team effectiveness, delivery quality, and organizational maturity. As a design leader, I focus on creating the conditions where strong design can scale—clear ownership, healthy critique, cross-functional alignment, and systems that support both speed and quality.
I partner closely with Product, Engineering, Operations, and executive leadership to ensure user experience, visual quality, and product direction stay aligned with business goals—especially in complex, high-stakes environments. My approach balances hands-on craft with structural leadership, helping teams ship confident, user-centered products while growing sustainably.
Highlights
Built and building & scaling design teams
Built and led high-performing design teams through thoughtful hiring, clear role expectations, and consistent coaching via bi-weekly 1:1s and structured critiques.
Defined a formal design career ladder (Apprentice → Staff) in partnership with Operations, clarifying growth paths, impact expectations, and promotion readiness across the organization.
Mentored designers across experience levels, helping them grow in both craft and ownership while operating in complex, high-stakes product environments.
Operating model & delivery quality
Designed and implemented operating models that improve team velocity without sacrificing quality.
Led alignment workshops across Product, Design, and Engineering to create shared understanding of problem spaces, constraints, and success criteria — reducing ambiguity early in the process.
Introduced new team norms and check-ins across vertical leads to strengthen horizontal alignment and reduce duplicated effort across initiatives.
Structured design critiques and review cadences to clarify expectations, accelerate decision-making, and ensure teams could move forward with confidence.
Tracked UX investments using McKinsey’s Horizon framework, helping teams balance short-term delivery with longer-term strategic bets.
Previously, established shared discovery, critique, and delivery rituals across multiple teams, improving consistency, speed, and overall delivery quality.
Cross-functional influence
Partnered closely with Product and Engineering leadership to define decision-making norms, clarify ownership, and improve cross-functional accountability.
Facilitated workshops and design sprints to align stakeholders early, validate direction, and accelerate progress in ambiguous and complex problem spaces.
Built alignment practices that shift teams from late-stage feedback to early collaboration, reducing rework and improving overall delivery speed
Designing for complex systems
Specialized in designing and leading teams working on complex, data-heavy systems, including healthcare, insurance, financial workflows, and AI-driven experiences.
Focused on reducing cognitive load and improving decision-making clarity in multi-step workflows such as billing, care coordination, and operational platforms.
Helped teams translate complex requirements and fragmented systems into intuitive, structured experiences that support confident user action.
Organizational & culture impact
Designed onboarding frameworks for designers and contractors that improved ramp-up time and were later adopted across Product and Engineering.
Led cross-craft Figma enablement through a champion model, increasing adoption across disciplines and improving collaboration quality.
Planned and facilitated annual design retrospectives, aligning teams around quarterly priorities and maintaining momentum across design systems and product initiatives.
Co-founded and co-led a New Moms ERG in partnership with HR, improving re-onboarding experiences, retention, and psychological safety.
Contributed to the design community through talks and workshops at Friends of Figma, KC Design Week, and Digital Scene KC.
Additional leadership responsibilities
As part of the leadership team, I provided end-to-end project oversight across Design, Product, and Engineering to ensure alignment, delivery quality, and team health. I also partnered with Sales and Marketing leadership to support growth initiatives, including pitches, scopes of work, and strategic planning—helping translate design value into business outcomes.
Career milestone
One of my most meaningful career milestones was leading the cross-functional work that resulted in the acquisition of Vera, after which I was promoted to Director of Design at Crema in Q4 2020. In this role, I balanced hands-on design leadership with overseeing multiple projects and supporting the growth of the design team—coaching designers, removing obstacles, and helping them grow as product thinkers and leaders.
Leadership philosophies & frameworks
How I lead
Kind, clear feedback
I give feedback continuously—not just in reviews—using structured, actionable approaches that increase clarity, alignment, and trust.Seek clarity to drive velocity
I focus on reducing ambiguity early—through clear problem framing, constraints, and success criteria—so teams can move faster with confidence and less rework.Early alignment over late feedback
I bring Product and Engineering into the work early, shifting teams away from big reveals and toward continuous collaboration—reducing friction and accelerating delivery.Design as a decision-making function
I see design not just as execution, but as a tool to support better decisions—structuring information and workflows so users (and teams) can act with confidence.Multipliers mindset
I focus on creating environments where designers feel trusted and accountable, helping others lead rather than creating dependency.Coaching through listening
In 1:1s, I lead with curiosity—starting with “What’s on your mind?”—and coach from there, not from assumptions.Emotional awareness under pressure
In high-stress moments, I help teams name emotions before solving problems, enabling better decisions and healthier collaboration.Proactive growth support
I assess strengths and gaps early through self-evaluation and coaching, tailoring support before performance issues arise.Intentional growth planning
I guide designers to align what energizes them, their long-term goals, and business needs into clear, actionable growth plans.
straight from lattice & WORKDAY
Director of Engineering
360 REVIEW
Pamela is always wanting to push the bar of the way we impact our clients. She's always wanting to grow and see others grow as well. I think she pushes for this within her design craft via her craft team goals, as well as helping them understand why they get pulled into unideal work.
VP of Product
(Manager)
PRAISE
Pamela did a wonderful job last week providing coverage for her fellow team members. She was stretched thin across multiple different topics, but found the time to jump into challenging topics and conversations and did so with finesse. She exhibited the ability to be cross-functional, and as her manager, this is great to see play out.
Director of Engineering
PRAISE
Amazing job facilitating the Dunn Design Sprint. Good energy, great conversations, keeping it light and flowing while also including the remote team smoothly. Not to mention you're both naturals with an influencer mic!
Staff Engineer
PRAISE
Great job facilitating the [redacted client] design sprint! That was a lot to get through and a lot of voices to hear. The team seems happy and excited about the direction
Director of Engineering
360 REVIEW
Pamela is very generous with her time and expertise, perhaps too generous at times. She supports the things that matter like sales, process improvements, jumping in on client work, open to talking about new service types and shaping that.
Senior Product Manager
360 REVIEW
Pamela brings a strong design presence to the work. She has a clear, grounded point of view, with deep UX craft and strong connection to the industry best practices that raises the bar for our experiences. I see her as a thought leader in the space - someone who can both zoom out to the bigger design strategy and zoom in to the details that really matter for customers. I am excited to keep collaborating with her as we shape where these experiences go next!
Senior Product Manager
PRAISE
Pamela - you are seriously one of the best designers I know! I mean that sincerely, not something I say to many others. You are good at listening to the clietn and hearing their needs/desires - then putting that into high fidelity desing. The speed at which you work is remarkable as well. You also have a serial lab friday technologist! I’m looking forward to reading about Meerkat getting acquired one day just as Vera did.
Product Manager
PRAISE
I know your plate has been completely full recently so I wanted to give you a shoutout for how you’ve incredibly well you’ve managed to keep everything going! This has built a huge amount of trust in me for you (not that I didn’t already trust you a ton!)
I think we are on all the same clients now, which is also really nice
Director of
Product
PRAISE
I love hearing you talk about design — you are so incredibly smart. Oftentimes (like this exact instant where I am eavesdropping) I don’t even need to have the context to be able to understand the message you are delivering or the story you are telling with the way you approach design thinking. You can take something incredibly complex and explain it to someone in a way they feel like they can relate and really understand. I am so proud to have you leading our design craft at Crema
Senior Engineer
PRAISE
Working so closely with you for hte last 6(?) months has taught me so much about design and how each craft support the other in bigger and better ways. You’re incredibly intentioanl and thoughtfl and it shows in everything you do. I’m excited to see what new strategies we can come up with together.
VP of Sales
PRAISE
You have been an amazingly supportive pitch parner over the last few weeks. You have been helpful on direct deals we’ve been pitching together AND indirect deals where we have just neeeded your support. Let’s go win this work
Senior Product designer (direct report)
PRAISE
Though you were on the web project for a short time and are not quite back yet, you had a huge impact on its success. I learned so much from you in a very short time and the [redacted client] website wouldn’t be the same without the time and effort you put in. Thank you again for your work to get us on the right track, bringing so many great ideas and feedback, quickly helping set a tone, steering me towards inspiration, process and a more organized setup, and your advice frm experience for managing what you knew would be challenging project with many moving pieces.
Senior Engineer
PRAISE
Thank you for your patience and quick assistance with all things SBI designs! I’ve watched you juggle multiple projects for years now and still have no idea how you do it - the product looks great and you make rolling with changes look easy.