Twilio design management

Working on Twilio SendGrid

I worked on Twilio SendGrid in 2022. I hired and onboarded the entire SendGrid UX team and brought back embedded UX to SendGrid's two products: Email + Marketing Campaigns.

Working as a horizontal resource

Across all of SendGrid, I supported 14 different PMs ranging from junior to director level. I partnered closely with the heads of Product to ensure I had signal on the highest priority initiatives so UX could support those initiatives. As a lean UX team, our clear constraint was resourcing, especially on Email.

I learned the true meaning of context switching - while I loved the sky high view I had over all of SendGrid that helped me identify connections between the products, it was also a challenge jumping around. It was a growth experience for me. I learned to develop strategic partnerships across both products, especially at the leadership levels, and to listen to my team to understand the day-to-day.

Getting back to my research roots

I always loved UX Research - it was one of the big draws that pulled me into UX all those years ago. As my research manager counterpart was on maternity leave, I was excited to work more closely with our newly hired researchers. I onboarded them, acted as their soundboard, gave them feedback and guidance and well, we had a blast working together as a closely unified UX team.

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The Great Reshuffle

Like many companies in recent months, we reorged in Jan 2023. My role changed - I managed 4 direct reports across SendGrid Email + Marketing Campaigns and the newly minted CX pillar in Foundational Services. My CX UX team included Design, UXR, Content Strategy and Service Design.

Most notably, my sky high view expanded to include all products in our part of Twilio: Segment CDP + Engage and SendGrid Email & Marketing Campaigns. Working on the CX pillar meant I needed to focus on overall experience to ensure consistency and best practices. One of my first tasks was to support the design system migration from Segment's design library to Twilio's, feeding into the company One Twilio initiative.

To quickly paint a picture, I had a lead designer focused on our design system migration. As he was the design system expert with plenty of experience but still relatively new, my goal was make sure his plan could support our ~40 person UX team and 10+ scrum teams. Not to mention with our reorg, we also had a new scrum team with new hires and a new team mission statement.

To set the team up for success, I set up a Ways of Working workshop in early January to outline how we'd work together, resulting in a team working agreement. It helped bring our new team together quickly so we could work towards our Q3 goal of 70% migration complete.

Since we had about 4 weeks of Q1 to finalize our design plan and share it with our UX team, it was really important that we have a clear understanding of who was responsible for what. I set up time with my lead designer for us to outline all our stakeholders and give us some scaffolding.

Between countless Zoom meetings, Google docs, plenty of revisions, Slack messages, Notion and Figma prep, my lead designer successfully delivered the plan to our org UX team in early February.

I learned so much in my time at Twilio. It was the largest UX team I've worked on and I saw how a large UX org and management team operates at scale. I focused on developing senior and tenured talent, connecting the dots at both leadership and IC levels and reviving UX on SendGrid. When my role expanded to include the new CX pillar, I was excited about the opportunity to have more impact on our org strategy. My work above showcases some snippets of my work and impact at Twilio so if it piqued your interest, I'd love to chat more.