Hi, I'm Meghan. Staff Product Designer @ Apollo GraphQL.

Design lead for all things growth. I have 7+ years experience with UI/UX, or whatever term you like to call good product design practice. I solve problems, I tell stories, and I teach others.
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Securing and optimizing access in ATS tools

A rebuild of Lever's role based access control (RBAC) model to meet enterprise customer needs and scale alongside SMB + mid-market as they grow. Goal: offer customization levers for user roles that meet customer's growing privacy and security requirements without inhibiting them further.  
View case study
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Building better products through personas

With 23 personas identified at Lever, there was no clarity on how those personas fit into feature initiatives or product roadmaps. I led the project from start to finish on getting our personas into clearer categories with known jobs to be done in order to tailor our access model to relevant functions and needs.
View case study
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Detecting meaningful trends in data with ML

A machine learning tool that empowers users to uncover meaningful fluctuations quickly without reliance on others to complete their jobs to be done while simultaneously creating trust and understanding between users and the logic being applied to produce or predict accurate results.
View case study
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Digitizing the home buying experience

Credible's product experience was built to empower users at different stages in their home buying process while increasing their trust and engagement with Credible. Additionally centered on making the home buying process transparent and accessible for everyone.
View case study
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Bringing transparency to auto-repair pricing

We built a tool that empowers users to uncover meaningful fluctuations quickly without reliance on others to complete their jobs to be done while simultaneously creating trust and understanding between users and the logic being applied to produce or predict accurate results.
View case study
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about me

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I currently lead design for product led growth initiatives alongside product and engineering leadership. I have 7 years experience, mostly in SaaS based tools. In tandem to work, I mentor for designed.org and Out in Tech U. Prior to Apollo, I've led projects like RBAC restructuring for Lever, API integrations for self-serve marketplaces, building data portals @ Twilio, machine learning analytics tooling @ Amplitude, + much more.

I believe the ability to create unique experiences through design is reliant on the ability to tell captivating and clear stories. Design is all around us, in all places, at all times. It powers the decisions we're able to make, or not make. I believe it is universal, and at the same time, invisible.
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I believe the ability to create unique experiences through design is reliant on the ability to tell captivating and clear stories. Design is all around us, in all places, at all times. It powers the decisions we're able to make, or not make. I believe it is universal, and at the same time, invisible.

services

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Product Design

I enhance product effectiveness and appeal to users through task-based analysis, competitive analysis, and quantitative/qualitative data to inform and improve product experiences.

My user-centric approach guarantees customers reach their "a-ha" faster by creating frictionless and usable experiences, increasing your activations, engagement, and retention.
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Product Sense

A product is only as good as the story it tells.  Ensure your feature initiatives have a clear and strategic vision that clearly communicates the value-prop to your target personas and stakeholders.

I prioritize customer and data insights to provide low risk solutions paired with the potential impact/outcome on the customer and business, allowing you to make more confident decisions faster.
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Roadmap Planning

Break through roadblocks, bridge perspectives, and ignite collaboration. I help teams and organizations articulate intuitions and turn those into tangible solutions, pathways, or roadmap items.

My design strategy focuses on the "bigger picture", enabling teams to build a strong and scalable foundation that seamlessly integrates each project milestone. Let's make your long term goals a reality.
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Workshopping

Incorporate a design-led workshop with all stakeholders or cross functional members in one room to drive quicker alignment on project goals, desired outcomes, feature prioritization, north stars, and more via a multitude of creative approaches.

All workshops are done live within Figjam, giving teams alignment and actionable tasks within 1-2 hours vs days/weeks of sporadic discussions.

Resume

Nov '22 - Present

Staff Product & Growth Designer

Growth Design Leader @ Apollo GraphQL. Solving fun problems around adoption/acquisition, engagement, and monetization drivers for 1) GraphQL developers and 2) multi-layered developer personas utilizing or seeking to utilize GraphOS, the graphQL observation and management tool.

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May '22 - Dec '22 (lay-off)

Sr Product Designer

Cross functional design lead for Data Platform, Report Center, and Consumer Trust teams. Design lead for all of the following projects: In-product tooling for billing and usage data dashboards. New internal tooling for a company wide single source-of-truth, self-serve database, replacing 5 inconsistent analytics tools. Twilio’s new account “trust level” tiering system targeting spam and fraudulent account reduction.

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Mar '21 - May '22

Sr Product Designer

Rebuilt Lever’s access & permissions model based on profiles, roles, and customization levers, layering in the ability for customers to auto-provision through HRIS integrations, reducing hours of manual user profile creation/deletion to a 1-click process. Led our new self-serve marketplace initiative for customer talent board integrations, which brought us from 3 to 1000+ job boards requiring limited engineering effort! Honorable mention: self-serve GDPR data compliance setting.

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Dec '19 - March '21

Sr Growth Designer

Led growth pillar design to iterate and test quickly on product solutions heavily tied into creating and maintaining a data driven culture. Led a new product feature initiative for “anomalies and forecasting” which reduced noise for users trying to monitor and understand key metric trends, continually improving accuracy through machine learning technology.

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Arise Health logoThe Paak logoOE logo2020INC logoEphicient logoEphicient logo

Testimonials

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Skip Allums

Design Leader | Ex Google, Ex PayPal
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"From Day 0 she demonstrated that she was a valuable asset to the team and to our customers. Meghan asks tough questions. She brings her broad design experience and sparks ideas for internal processes. As a Design leader, I have to trust that each person on my team will be a strong user advocate, and Meghan fights for the user every time. Would definitely work with Meghan again!"

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Sophie Edelman

Sr. Technical Recruiter @ Ford
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"I hired Meghan to help design my website. Meghan knocked it out of the park! I was so impressed with how she improved my website designs. She took a standard template I had put together and within a week the entire site had been overhauled and it was such an improvement. I'm very pleased with the work she produced and it was a joy working with her. I recommend!"

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Deep Jani

Staff PM @ Lever
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"I worked with Meghan during her time at Lever. We oversaw highly impactful product areas such as Data Compliance & Privacy, and User Access & Permissions. I am a huge advocate for her as she displayed the ability to understand, extract, and synthesize customers’ needs through continuous discovery & research. Her raw horsepower coupled with strong user empathy bolstered our ability to develop scalable solutions that addressed the most complex user needs while keeping business objectives in sight. I would love to work with her again in the future!"

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Josh Skinner

Sr Product Designer @ Loop
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"Meghan was genuinely such a pleasure to work with. From the day she started, she displayed a strong willingness to learn and explore new concepts and ideas. Meghan is also a versatile designer; she is quick to adapt to new problem spaces and environments all while providing a thoughtful and elevated solution in the end. She also spearheaded several critical initiatives at Lever, laying the groundwork for a successful design team. I look forward to having the privilege to work with Meghan again in the future."

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Dimitri Salzmann

PM and Dev @ FeaturedCustomers
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"Meghan is both a fantastic designer and a great team player. Would recommend to any company looking for a designer or product leader"

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Steven Cohn

Founder, CEO of Winware.ai
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"Meghan was an integral part of designing our MVP. She is great at capturing user needs and turning them into elegant designs. She works well with both developers and the business team. I loved partnering with Meghan."

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Cortney Ho

Mentee, OiTU
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"Meghan was my Out in Tech mentor last fall, and was the best mentor anyone could ask for. Throughout the 8-week program, Meghan was incredibly patient and supportive of my journey toward professional self-discovery. She always encouraged me to work towards the goals we set at the beginning of the program, elevating my understanding of the diverse demands and roles within the tech industry. Under Meghan’s guidance, I brought together design elements, user interface guidelines, and performance expectations to successfully create a mock product requirement doc. At the start of the mentorship I had no idea what to expect from post-grad life. Now, since I’ve started job hunting, I feel so much more confident and equipped to enter the professional world!"

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Your Name Here

Top Dog @ Company
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"This could be you!"

FAQs

Commonly asked questions about product designers, the value of adding one, and other general questions.

Why should I partner with a product designer?

Adding a designer to your project allows you to create tangible product solutions tailored to your personas and their jobs to be done. This is imperative in order to confidently ship high impact feature(s) with predictable outcomes (reducing risk) and additionally produce valuable outcomes with each initiative.

Relevancy is a key factor for users to have enough interest to engage, in fact, studies show you have around 15 seconds to capture their attention.

A well-designed product can guide users through the conversion funnel more effectively. Whether it's making a purchase, signing up, or taking any desired action, a strong designer can optimize the user journey to maximize conversion rates. Optionally, designers can inform product on their learnings and iterate upon designs that tie into monetization strategies.

What type of services do you offer?

I am open to project based work, contract based work, mentoring aspiring designers or product managers, speaking opportunities, workshopping, and product roadmapping.

If there is something you are interested in that I didn't mention above, send me a message! I'm an open book.

What's the difference between a UI, UX, and Product Designer?

If I had a dollar for every time I heard this question... i might not need to work at all. Designers don't just draw squares!

UI stands for user interface. A "user interface" the point of interaction between a user and a digital device or product. UI is focused on the visual parts of the process, like icons, buttons, typography, color palettes, or any other visual / interactive element.

UX stands for "user experience". UX is focused on the users experience, (such as usability) of your product, This involves thinking strategically about how it makes your users feel, think, and how easy it is to complete their desired tasks successfully.  Task analysis and research are heavily involved in a UX process in order to inform solutions focused on improving the users experience and positive feelings within that process.

Product design is both of those things combined.

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