Director of Product Design
2021 – 2022
Background
I joined Mural in November 2021 as a Design Director for Growth. At that point Mural has grown massively within the last couple of years and the need was to streamline processes and improve the experience with a major redesign.
As a Director for Design I led a team of designers and design managers, we delivered experiences for the website Mural.co and the experiences for login, registration, activation (user onboarding), sharing, and payments.
Resulting in engaging new users, reactivating old ones, the virality of the product and a paying platform where users could acquire their subscriptions.
Key Contributions:
- UX Strategy: Defining the vision, mission, and roadmap for user centered solutions that align with business goals and deliver value.
- Cross-functional leadership: led the Growth Pillar with VP of product and Engineering director, rising the quality bar for what the team delivered.
- Lead design: Establishing and evolving design standards, methods, and processes to maintain consistency, quality, and impact. We released the Mural monetization flows implementing online payments.
- Facilitation: Guiding workshops, discussions, and collaborative sessions to align teams, solve problems, and conversations to don’t get to hooked in growth and metrics hacks but to solve real user problems.
- Coached, mentored and advocated for designers and good design practices
Design Goals
Improve Design quality and implement the brand redesign
Align Design with a Product Led Growth Strategy / Design the monetization engine
Create a bold
UX vision
for experiments
Work highlights
Process
As the Director of Product Design for Growth, my role was to provide the structure, vision, and cohesive strategy that empowered my team to deliver their best work. Collaborating closely with the Engineering Director and VP of Product, we aligned teams with clear direction and clarified business goals. To ensure accountability and focus, we worked with quarterly OKRs, tracking progress against key targets.
As a hands-on design leader, I actively supported my team through regular sessions, including retrospectives, ideation workshops, design sprints, reviews, feedback sessions, and health checks. My involvement ensured that designers had the resources and support they needed to thrive and create impactful work.
Given the Growth team’s focus on experimentation, I prioritized creating a roadmap for design improvements to maintain the quality of successful experiments as they were scaled and implemented. This approach not only delivered impactful solutions but also ensured that design was a key driver of strategic outcomes.
Examples of activities done with the team:
Hack days (A great practice I brorrowed from Spotify)
For Mural Growth the hackdays helped us ideating a new onboarding experience, we had plenty of insights about the issues customers faced with onboarding and based on that the team ideated and prototyped different solutions.
Design vision
guided the team through different activities to generate our Design Vision
User Journey Map
defined the steps our users took and the surfaces we owned as a team
Together with my counterparts of Product and Engineering, we worked in several sessions to put together a one pager for teams to guide themselves on the business goals for the year.
We presented this document during a kick off meeting done in January 2022 and shared with the teams:
– Growth Vision for the year.
– Defined what the monetization (self serve engine) needed and why.
– We generated key hypotheses.
– A high level roadmap.
– And reorganized the teams for the work that needed to get done.
Created an unified, bold UX vision based on insights and business goals, generated the team’s design vision, to guide the work through the year 2022 and beyond. This vision was also used by Product and Engineering
Mural Growth Case study
Interested to see more of the work I did during my time at Mural?