Partner

JAN 2024 - PRESENT · 2.6 years

Mandel Creative coaches creative, professional, and technical teams and individuals to collaborate and communicate more courageously. The techniques we teach help people to be more honest with themselves and each other at work, resulting in greater collective and personal growth potential, increased capacity for innovation, and the foundation needed to build a thriving, diverse workplace culture where humans enjoy working.

Founder + CEO

JAN 2023 - PRESENT · 3.6 years

PeopleWork thrives at the intersection of design talent and new ventures. We recruit and coach design leaders and collaborators to help you build high-performing, connected teams. Once your business has a solid talent foundation, you can achieve anything.

Chair, Master of Interaction Design Program

MAR 2020 - AUG 2024 · 4.5 years

Led and scaled a successful, unique one-year graduate program into its 2.0 by updating its curriculum, diversifying its faculty base, introducing new electives, marketing, teaching, advisory, and more. With faculty, I interview and recruit dozens of adjuncts each year, lead and facilitate cross-section conversations, and build camaraderie and community. With prospective students, I lead a faculty team to review 300+ applications each year, market the program with portfolio AMAs and infosessions, and have augmented the application process with new standards and workflows. With each year-long cohort of 60 students, I lead orientation and onboarding, program opportunities for socialization, advise student project teams, interact with industry clients and partners, and mentor students 1:1. With the Design Division, I market the program through events and lectures (including with San Francisco Design Week and other industry events), coordinate promotion and video documentation, and share & network with other Chairs. Also, I teach Designing your Career, and Leadership by Design, and offer workshops in the program.

Associate Professor

JAN 2019 - PRESENT · 7.6 years

Recruiter

SEP 2022 - JUN 2023 · 10 months

Executive coaching and leadership recruiting. Referred a key early hire who is now Partner. Also consulted in design operations, cultural, and team-building practices.

Head of Design (Fractional)

JAN 2019 - DEC 2022 · 4 years

Integrated product, marketing, and brand design for pre-seed startup. Recruited CTO and founding designer, interviewed C-suite, led a research effort for the 2.0, helped close a seed round, and established cross-functional cultural practices for a globally distributed team.

Founder + CEO

JAN 2013 - DEC 2022 · 10 years

Productized design deliverables for startups, founding teams, and new initiatives delivered in sprints and focused workshops. Clients included: Salesforce, Blend, MeetingPulse, CSTMR, Buildium, StartOut, DreamFund, SloFoodGroup, Colloquial Insights, Trove, Logobase, Tizra, Madge’s Hatbox, We The Future, and more.

Strategy + Design consultant

JAN 2018 - DEC 2018 · 1 year

Strategy and brand identity design for select companies in Sequoia’s portfolio. Projects included universal design career ladder, and design team cultural practices.

Founder, Design Operations

JAN 2016 - DEC 2018 · 3 years

As the first DesignOps person inside Twitter’s Product Team, my role was strategic, cultural, contextual, and tactical. I built a bridge between the Brand/Marketing and Product teams. Supporting a distributed team of ~100 product designers and content strategists, some of the programs I created and led were: • weekly design critiques, facilitation, socialization, documentation, and ongoing process improvement – including the prototyping of a CritKit for anytime, anywhere crits • branding and naming the design system, Horizon, including ongoing education to designers about its use, effectiveness, and governance • founding a cross-functional OpsTeam, including roadmap sync • and more, including design process, design principles, project leaderboard, library of experiments & case studies, standardizing tools, blog writing & facilitation, guest visits from local UX classes, mentoring program, recruiting events, industry promotion on DesignBetter.co, and studio space configuration

Design Fellow

JAN 2015 - DEC 2017 · 3 years

Lead and co-taught four cohorts of the Visual Design class. Leveled up the curriculum as the first Visual Design Fellow.

Founder + CEO

JAN 1997 - DEC 2017 · 21 years

Schwadesign was a network of brand strategists, content strategists, designers of all kinds, and developers, all curated in project-specific teams to reflect client needs. Clients included Blue Man Group, the City of Providence RI, DentaQuest, Friends of Dana-Farber, AIDS Action Committee of MA, MassEquality, Harvard University Systems Biology PhD Program, Brown University, Jobs for the Future, Ounce Labs, Perforce, MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Trinity Pharma, and more.

Founding Designer, IBM Cloud Garage

JAN 2015 - DEC 2016 · 2 years

One of a few founding designers of the IBM Cloud (née Bluemix) Garage. Hosted client workshops and sprints around the world, using IBM Design tools, for both startups and Fortune 500 global corporations. Pitched new client business; improved operations, standards, and processes; authored marketing content; customized curriculum to local markets; aligned methods across six Garage locations.