As the Chicago Studio lead at Grubhub I manage an amazing collection of 30+ designers, user researchers and content strategists. My team owns 10+ interfaces and 3 different user types and supports a product organization of over 70 product managers. My day to day responsibilities includes overseeing teams designing for Delivery Operations, Restaurant Management, Customer Care, Corporate Accounts, and Internal Tools. During my time Grubhub our team has grown by 2x and our average tenure has almost tripled.

My team philosophy is simple. Hire the best people and let them do their work. My job is to adapt and fill in gaps on the team. A functioning and happy team is the most clear indication that I am doing my job well.

Part of having a functioning and happy team is having repeatable processes that set good expectations for the team. Below is a collection of some of the tools and processes I have helped to create and implement during my time at Grubhub.

Hiring Guide

I worked with a small team to formalize our hiring process from recruiting through on-boarding with a focus on setting the right expectations from the beginning of the process and also making sure to give both sides enough time to truly understand each other before moving forward.

At the beginning of 2019 I worked with 2 designers on my team to completely revamped our team Leveling Documentations into a Growth Guide. The goal of this work is to provide clarity, consistency and visibility into how we evaluation members of the design team.

Our design team was suffering from very unproductive design reviews. A Q1 goal was to make Design Reviews more helpful for the design team an find a more productive way to bring out stakeholders into the review process. This need lead to a revamp of our design review process to include a more structured presentation format and also introduced Design Salons for more unstructured design time. The key was to have a repeatable process for designers to get design feedback. Prompting them to think about the keys to a good design review - context, project stage, feedback needed, goal/metric of the feature.