Nov 2024 – Mar 2025 · 4 mos · Remote

• 200-hour generative and evaluative UX research project for Sanofi. Insights, actionable suggestions, and high-level optimized future state customer experience flows.

Aug 2023 – Jun 2024 · 10 mos · Remote

• (Accepted job May 2023. Caught up in paperwork for months before starting.) Leading a team of one UX Researcher, one Associate UX Researcher, one awesome student worker, plus some other UX Researchers with partial allocation to our project. Contract through June 2024 (end of fiscal year).
• Working on a very high-profile, high-priority internal project at ASU. A tool that will be used by students, advisors, coaches, prospective students, and others.
• Collaborating with teammates and stakeholders at various points of the process to ensure that we are setting them up for success with the information and answers they need when they need them. Working with an "inner circle" and "outer circle" of stakeholders that include our Designer, Project Managers, a Product Manager, Business Analysts, Researchers from other departments, Data and Analytics, and reps from the Provost's Office.
• We're in continuous cycles of generative and evaluative research, each study combining some of both. That way, we are always getting stakeholders and teammates answers to their open questions, and replacing assumptions with data. And we're getting feedback to the fantastic UX Designer on improvements to the prototype plus new problems for her to solve.
• Tools and techniques:
• Discovery Phase Knowledge Quadrant [https://rbefored.com/dont-guess-discover-use-the-dpkq-aka-the-quadrant-exercise-7e0c0d44a4cd]
• Observational research, in-depth interviews.
• Analysis and synthesis in Condens (previously we used UserTesting), Miro, Google Sheets, and AirTable.

Jan 2022 – Jul 2022 · 6 mos

• Strategize, plan, and shepherd the company toward customer-centricity and a healthy "user obsession." :)
• During 6-month consulting contract:
• Interviewed over 70 staff and execs. Learned what stands in the way of improved customer-centricity.
• Technically the “Interim VP”; reported to C-level execs. Strategized and planned internal operational changes.
• Created two reports suggesting improvements. Warned about high-risk issues: expensive projects likely to fail, lack of future and strategic planning, inattention to customer experiences and complaints, wrong North Star Metric, and much more.
• Planned, prioritized initiatives and change management in partnership with Operations.
• They decided to take very little of my advice, and then had their worst financial year possibly ever, losing over $1B and ending the year with a negative revenue number. It wasn't the economy or market; direct competitors had strong years. Coincidence? Who can say?
• Elevate UX initiative: grow the UX department, change how they are included in projects, raise work standards.
• Co-designed the future UX org, growing it to a larger world-class team. Defining new roles and responsibilities.
• Helped on the Product Discovery Playbook. Co-authoring the UX Collaboration Playbook, Competency Matrix, and job descriptions.
• "Learning Lounge" presentation on "UX: Why, When, Who" to help other domains understand what UX really does, who does it, and when do you want to partner with UX.
• Coaching UX workers on both research and design.
• Planning to shift from a feature factory to task-oriented, research-informed decisions and designs.
• Transitioning insights, plans, and suggestions to in-house change agents and those involved in transformations.

Jul 2021 – Sep 2021 · 2 mos

• 3-month contract as an internal change agent and Head of Experience Design. I ran strategy, operations, and really everything related to the practice areas (mostly CX, UX, and UI).
• 6 high-level staff report to me (3 managers, 3 Lead UX). ~30 indirect reports.
• Redefined how we QA work.
• Refreshed our job titles and hierarchy to create a clearer path for growth and leadership.
• Expanded our capabilities, especially in specialized qualitative research.
• As an internal change agent, and in collab with the Heads who own each of these:
• I refreshed our mission, vision, values, brand promise, and value propositions.
• I changed how we interview, increasing our efficiency and removing "challenges" unless abs necessary.
• I pushed for a visual rebrand (in progress) which will lead to a new website and PPT deck.
• I rewrote the PPT slides we show to potential clients.
• I changed how we scope and propose projects. Great accuracy and granularity sets up our teams and the project for greater success.
• Clearer internal process for how we respond to RFPs.
• Changed how we assess external vendors and freelancers to better enforce our standards for quality.
• Partnered with HR on improvements to the culture and a refreshed Employee Value Proposition with updated policies including remote work.
• Improvements to how we resourced projects, oversaw their progress and health, keeping an eye on the budget.
• People have been mostly excited about the changes :) and 6 weeks in, the CEO told me he can relax for the first time in months. That says a lot. Unfortunately, due to budgeting, my contract was ended after 12 weeks. Looks like Mary Poppins has to fly away again.

Jan 2019 – Present · 7 yrs 4 mos

• Writing, publishing, and self-publishing various titles for diverse audiences. Helping authors tell their stories. Years of writing presentations, workshops, conference sessions, and keynote speeches.
• Most of my over 100 business articles are on RBeforeD.com.
• 2025 projects:
• Editing, proofreading, and formatting a 75K-word on becoming a masterful coach. Will be published by an ICF-accredited coaching program.
• Formatting and mild editing of a music textbook for a professor.
• My published books:
• 2026 (work in progress)
• New book about product-market fit taking a fresh approach.
• 2024
• "Life After Tech." 156 pages about career change, introspection, and what to do when you're done with tech or tech is done with you.
• "Canetti Perfetti: Book 1: Meet The Family." 94-page children's book about my dogs.
• 2023
• "Disruptive Research: Discover Unmet User Needs That Drive Revolutionary Innovations" by Larry Marine. I was the ghostwriter.
• 2022
• "Customers Know You Suck: Actionable CX Strategies to Better Understand, Attract, and Retain Customers." 334-page business book aimed at all roles and levels. Narrated, engineered, and produced the audiobook.
• 2019
• "DevOps ICU: Improve Processes and Results by Correctly Integrating UX: A Guide for Product, Project, and Engineering Leaders and Workers." 110 pages aimed at non-CX/UX roles
• "Delta CX: The Truth About How Valuing Customer Experience Can Transform Your Business," nearly a textbook (384 large pages) about improving CX/UX practice and our companies' customer centricity.

Feb 2018 – Present · 8 yrs 3 mos

• See https://deltacx.coach to learn more and book an appointment. First session is free.
• Private coaching, mostly related to life, organization, relationships, communication, career, work, and leadership. Completed hundreds of hours of private coaching with tech workers in various roles and at all levels.
• I now have the ICF ACC credential.
• There is no fixed program. Clients book time as they need support, work reviews, or help with strategic or tactical tasks. The first call is free. After that, clients can pay as they go, or purchase discounted packages of hours.
• Most clients want coaching around career direction, research, design, work conflicts, disempowerment, broken processes, and job hunting including resumes, CVs, and portfolios. Some conversations fall into "life coaching."

Jun 2009 – Present · 16 yrs 11 mos

• Open to work, projects, consulting, and Fractional CXO and CPO work. Product and service strategy.
• Recent project: Behavioral and attitudinal qual research for a startup. Product strategy, ecosystem, roadmap. https://customercentricity.com/case-studies/fintech-startup-case-study-2023/
• Recent project: UX strategy and customer-centricity transformation project for $1B European company. https://customercentricity.com/case-studies/stepstone-case-study-2022/
• Current project: Research and actionable suggestions to help a Dutch company expand into a new market.
• Recent project: Remote observational research project with 70 participants for a well-known international eCommerce platform. Final report included findings, insights, opportunities, and suggestions to improve a spectrum of experiences for key customers. Follow-up card story study, unmoderated and moderated.
• Delta CX is my business transformation, CX, and UX consulting firm. We redefine and create problem-solving customer products, services, and experiences. We create product and service strategies, and the innovations that often go with fresh initiatives.
• We are change agents who improve internal processes, culture, and collaboration. Delta CX customizes solutions for every challenge, question, and project. Our work is about depth and quality. Services include all areas of HCD and UCD (auditing, research, content, architecture, interaction design, testing, iteration, visual design, & documentation). We are problem finders and problem solvers.
• We train teams, departments, and companies on CX and UX transformations, improvements, and approaches. We have training programs for non-CX/UX roles (engineering, product, project, business analysts, leadership, execs, Agile coaches, etc.) as well as for CX and UX workers, managers, and leadership.
• (Formerly known as Ptype, Brass Flowers, & As Was.)

Jun 2009 – Present · 16 yrs 11 mos

• My training, keynotes, and conference presentations and workshops are aimed at improving product, customer satisfaction, collaboration, and culture by correctly integrating CX and UX experts and approaches into software dev organizations, processes, and teams. I speak to and train both CX/UX teams as well as our non-CX/UX teammates and leaders.
• I'm available to speak or train on-site or remotely. All of my presentations were written to be equally effective in person as well as over a video call.

Sep 2018 – May 2019 · 8 mos

• Dec 2018 - May 2019 Job title officially was "Product Manager," but I acted as the interim Director of UX and Product at a small but publicly traded company focused on a video tool mostly for sales, marketing, and entrepreneurs. They previously had no PM so I was collecting ideas, creating features, organizing them into releases, and starting a product release schedule and backlog. I wrote user stories and some acceptance criteria. I used Aha! as my main tool for the strategic and tactical side of product management.
• On the UX side, I was doing all of the IA and interaction design, collaborating with UI and Engineering, and presenting to stakeholders. I got to speak to a few users and run a little UX research, planned for a lot more, but passed the torch before getting authorization to do more. I helped the company get better focused when I showed them some early personas I had drafted.
• Most importantly, I was able to raise the company's UX IQ. When I got there, their dev methodology was mostly, "What does the CEO want today?" After a few weeks, I had a good cadence of feeding engineering, making sure UX was rarely their bottleneck (as close to never as possible), and getting non-UX roles to assign tickets to me (vs patching ambiguities themselves).

May 2016 – Mar 2018 · 1 yr 10 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Contractor for mostly Macy's and a bit of Bloomingdale's. Worked on the iPhone app, a bit on Android, some desktop and mobile (responsive) web, and even a bit of email design. Some of my projects have been Lean and/or Agile.
• (Now live, public) Projects I can mention include:
• Showing filtering facets in search/browse results to help users narrow down faster. Mobile Web.
• iOS experimental lab innovating app ideas.
• App-based, in-store mobile checkout. iOS and Android.
• Internal project designing an app workers use to reserve conference rooms. iOS and Android.
• And some interesting, innovative projects I can't mention due to them not being live or public. Also did recurring competitive analyses.
• Taught the UX department my 16-hour "Core Skills" Axure workshop.
• Worked remotely from Arizona and Italy from May 2017 until my contract ended in March 2018.
• Industries: B2C, retail, eCommerce

Aug 2015 – Jan 2016 · 5 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Interaction design and information architecture for various projects. Wireframing and prototyping mobile responsive design.
• Industries: Cloud, networking, security, finance, SaaS

Jun 2015 – Aug 2015 · 2 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Interaction design and information architecture for various projects. Wireframing and prototyping mobile responsive design.

Feb 2015 – May 2015 · 3 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Short-term contract. Worked in Axure on multiple projects. Desktop web with responsive tablet and phone versions. Key project was a B2B portal on which I was UX lead.
• Industries: B2B, home repair

Dec 2014 – Jan 2015 · 1 mo · San Francisco Bay Area

• Short contract. Worked on the Stanford Health website project. Interaction design and wireframing.
• Industries: B2C, health

Jan 2014 – Oct 2014 · 9 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Product design, mentoring our juniors, training people on Axure, and improving the product where I can.
• Interaction design, wireframing, prototyping. Working closely with the UX Research and Testing team to refine designs.
• Main software used: Axure, Adobe Creative Suite, Sketch, Omnigraffle
• Industries: B2C, communication, small business

May 2013 – Nov 2013 · 6 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Working on proposals, UX research, competitive analysis, personas, scenarios, IA and site diagram, interaction design, wireframes, and prototypes for a huge website redo for a financial services company.
• Creative Lift also brought me back in 2014 for some interaction and design for an insurance lead form.
• Industries: B2B, finance

Apr 2013 – Apr 2013 · 0 mo · San Francisco Bay Area

• Short term contract as UX Lead and Axure prototyper for the next version of their iPhone app.
• Industries: B2C, finance

Feb 2013 – Mar 2013 · 1 mo · San Francisco, CA

• UX lead, interaction design, and Axure ninja-ing for a variety of projects. Desktop web and mobile web with responsive design.
• Traction brought me back in summer 2013 for an Axure prototype, and October 2014 for interaction design and prototyping.
• Industries: Telecom, Retail, B2C

Apr 2012 – Oct 2012 · 6 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Mobile UX and Interaction Design for mobile web, smartphone and tablet application, and other banking products.
• Main software used: Axure, Photoshop, and Omnigraffle.
• Industries: B2C, finance

Jan 2012 – Apr 2012 · 3 mos · Redwood City, CA

• Short term contract. Wireframes, annotated blueprint specification documents, clickable prototypes, and process flows for web, mobile (Android phones and tablets), and some gaming-related products. As the only Interaction Designer in the UXC department, I’m a utility player sent to be the UX and IxD person for various teams and projects around the Redwood Shores and San Jose offices.
• Main software used: Illustrator, InDesign, and Axure.
• Industries: B2C, entertainment, gaming, mobile OS