Something corporate

Another timely update on this side of the house: as of this spring, I’m now a UX director for design engineering (aka front-end web development - good old HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) at a very large company headquartered in Rhode Island.

It’s my first corporate gig! I’m back in an office most days of the week. And, I’m leading a team again after a relatively restful few years as an individual contributor. I’ve enjoyed re-activating my people-manager neurons and will likely have something more to say about that at a later time.

Occasionally asked questions

What’s this gig?

My team builds, maintains and promotes active use of our design system, and our devs serve as front-end code experts within the company - they write the code that customers interact with directly when they use our websites. It feels like a natural next step for me after many years leading UX and web development at an academic library, then a few years working in design and design systems governance, and really learning deeply about accessibility in practice, at federal scale. It’s a good mix of tech and accessibility know-how, people ops, and UX strategy.

What precipitated the move?

I knew when I started work in civic tech that federal contracting is inherently unstable work. But in January 2025, DOGE arrived, alongside a series of truly asinine executive orders. I saw the writing on the wall as many friends lost their jobs very suddenly, and as many organizations drew back on their DEI and accessibility commitments - both things that impacted me personally, as well as the kind of work I was doing. I also knew I was both too specialized and not specialized enough to seek most UX roles. I had the luxury of looking for a job while I still had a job, which is good, because I was on the market for over a year. I was looking for somewhere I could root, grow, support a team, and use my expert generalist skills for good, and I found it.

What’s your day-to-day like as an engineering manager?

It’s a mix of altitudes. Part of the time, I’m blocking and tackling for 8 engineers who are working across 3 projects and widely varying time zones. I try to enable the team to talk with each other, collaborate smoothly with their designer colleagues, document all the things, and get work done for their agile teams. The rest of the time, I’m working with the other UX directors to set strategy and plan out the next few months and the next few years for our UX group. It’s a lot of meetings, Teams messages, and emails, and very very little code, which is absolutely a match for my skillset at this point in my career.

So, how is corporate life? Really.

Corporate is in many ways exactly as pictured on TV, and it’s also similar to my past lives in higher ed and the federal government: large, complex, occasionally inscrutable, and also home to kind folks who care about doing good work. New jargon, new strategy, same big-organization vibes. I have not had to look hard to find people who, like me, are weird and not apologetic about it. Bonus: my team is great.

That’s it! More soon - I feel like I have many other posts brewing, but wanted to get this one out first. More blogging in 2026!