United States

Graphic Design

UX Design

UI/ Visual Design

Branding and Identity Design

Service Design

Product Design

Customer Experience (CX)

Growth Design

Leonardo De La Rocha

VP, Design

Relationship management

Communication

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Empathy

Leadership

Data visualisation

Design systems

Illustration

User research

UserTesting

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Photoshop

Figma

Notion

Understanding factors that lead to a motivated team - recognition, communication and more.

Keeping team members motivated

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

How to create a positive workplace culture that drives collaboration and productivity?

Fostering a good team culture

Steps to building and maintaining a strong, cohesive and effective team.

Building an effective team

Learn the tips to successfully manage a team in a remote environment.

Managing a remote team

Making remote and globally distributed teams work for you and your needs.

Working remotely

Learn essential burnout prevention techniques and replenish physical and emotional energy.

Managing burnout

Talk to people who have learned to manage their imposter syndrome.

Dealing with imposter syndrome

Talk to other immigrants about the nuances and challenges of working in the tech industry.

Being an immigrant in tech

Keeping your sanity, career growth and job satisfaction.

Surviving a merger or acquisition

Navigating micro-aggression, getting paid what you are worth and finding a community.

Being a woman in tech

Strategies for maximizing your design internship or co-op program.

Getting the most out of my internship

Tips for transitioning into a new role or company.

Changing roles

How to successfully prepare and position yourself for a job promotion?

How to get promoted

How to ask for a promotion and negotiate for salary raise?

Negotiating a job offer

How to think about design career paths and what progression looks like for designers?

Design career path

Get actionable feedback on your resume or portfolio.

Resume and portfolio review

Practice HR, technical and behavioural interviews with mentors.

Practice mock interviews

Talk to people who've broken into the tech industry and learn their stories.

Breaking into tech

Learn the best ways to answer technical interview questions with frameworks

Acing technical interview questions

How to set up the team for success by defining and measuring team's performance.

Choosing metrics and team goals

Best practices for running productive design critiques.

Running effective design critiques

Methods of prototyping and solution validation. When to use which kind of prototype (eg. Webflow, Notion, etc)

Prototyping methods and tips

Manage team expectations and get the most out of your meetings.

Running effective meetings

Learn how to properly present your work and share ideas and opinions.

Presenting your work with impact

How to work with team members with different skill sets but towards a common goal?

Working cross-functionally

Methods and models of exploring, deciding and delivering design.

Building a design process

Managing being the only designer at your company and working with non-designers.

Being the only designer

Explore different generative and evaluative research techniques. User research synthesis and presentation.

Conducting good user research

Ways and resources to improve your design skills.

Improving design skills

Navigating the working relationship with PM's and engineers as a designer.

Working with product and engineering

How to create personas, and leverage them in design.

Creating and leveraging user personas

Ways to provide constructive feedback to team members.

Giving effective feedback

How to conduct interviews, what to ask, and how to analyze your results? (eg. user interview)

Conducting effective customer interviews

What are design systems and how to work with them?

Building successful design systems

Brand and Customer/Employee Experience advisor to Bondadosa who are on a mission to create a more sustainable Colorado Food ecosystem.

Advisory role focused on customer experience and communication design for Mountainview, CA based fintech startup.

Working across Intuit to create and ensure a One Intuit Design System. Leonardo is currently driving a company-wide design system strategy, has defined the vision and developed an action plan that delivers on a One Intuit Design System for all of our cornerstone brands including TurboTax, QuickBooks, ProConnect, and Mint.

As a creative lead for Business Marketing at Facebook, Leonardo managed a team of designers and copywriters who help craft compelling narratives around Facebook's family of apps and services to marketers and advertisers, big and small.

Focused on Facebook's digital marketing surfaces, Leonardo has helped impact Facebook's Ad Product traffic and revenue metrics through forward thinking creative rooted in data.

facebook.com/business

Leonardo began his stint at Facebook leading multiple product design teams that helped power Facebook's rapidly evolving advertising platform. Dubbed the "Outcomes" team, Leonardo drove efforts to bring clarity to Facebook's more complex tools -- from ad targeting and ad delivery mechanisms to campaign Reporting and Measurement. His organization also inherited the oversight of Facebook's Business Design standards, evolving what was at first a skunkworks effort to drive better, more consistent experiences to a full-blown XFN team with engineering support that helped scale design standards globally.
            

    
    

    
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I started in the Advertising and Data organization as the primary UX resource for the ground-up development of Yahoo's first self-serve, native advertising platform (Gemini). 

After a successful 45-day war room for launch and numerous wins thereafter, I built a core team of designers to maintain the Gemini product and transitioned to oversee UX for all of Yahoo's ads and data products. There, I built and led a remarkable team of 20 design and dev resources to:

· Redefine a disparate pattern library, creating the perception of a modern and unified product suite

· Develop standards and principles for ongoing iteration and innovation against our design language

· Create venues for global design sharing and critiques to better connect Yahoo designers, de-duping efforts, and create overt accountability for high-quality design

· Advocate for better/faster deployment through a centralized design system by way of Ember app kit + Bootstrap theme

· Strengthen research-guided design process through close collaboration with Yahoo researchers

In addition to my primary charter, I served on Yahoo's global design council. Our aim: provide the best resources for design success, and create environments where stellar design thinking thrives. Most recently, this service extended into helping my design leadership cohorts pull together our strongest designers to create a single, consistent (yet flexible) design system that raised the bar of excellence across Yahoo products.
            

    
    

    
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As Director of User Experience Design for Publishing at Yahoo! I oversaw UI & Interaction Design, front-end development, and all aspects of user experience for Yahoo!'s global suite of publishing tools.

My charter was to design, build, and maintain tools that allow Yahoo!'s international team of editors to quickly program content across myriad O&O destinations and create amazing content experiences for a daily audience of over 700 million.

My approach to Yahoo!'s large scale publishing was to create editorial processes that leverage metrics to inform more effective content programming -- where revenue, shelf-life, and audience reach are maximized. I also constantly strive to combine beautiful aesthetics with intuitive functionality to ensure both internal and consumer facing publishing experiences are as delightful as they are easy. 

My skills have matured over 12 years while creating intuitive design experiences around content creation, aggregation, and consumption on both enterprise level publishing platforms and niche, home-grown content management systems which I've architected from the ground up. At Yahoo!, this experience -- coupled with my passion for effective visual and interaction design -- has helped me create and lead a cross-disciplined team to redesign and rebuild Yahoo!'s disparate, siloed, legacy publishing tools into a single, scaleable publishing platform.

On top of our many publishing specific wins, I also led my team across boundaries to deliver amazing design solutions outside of our wheelhouse. Recent examples include contributions to Yahoo!'s global design language and future-thinking global navigation system, Yahoo!'s Fantasy Football applications for iPhone, iPad and Android, the Yahoo! Local experience, and interactive, content-rich ad units delivered across the Y! network.
            

    
    

    
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Services included organizing projects and events that aimed to enrich the lives of AiC Alumni and promotes The Art Institutes’ mission of being the leading educator in the creative arts through our recognition of alumni success and career focused approach.

Responsibilities also included advisement around strengthening curriculum with cutting edge design technologies and modern design practices.

I continue to assist alumni by attending portfolio reviews and industry consulting sessions.
            

    
    

    
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One of the original seven volunteers for Denver Botanic Gardens Technology Task Force. Completed the first roadmap of the website overhaul for the organization in 2007, which resulted in being one of the top five most visited websites for the botanic gardens industry today with over 3 million page views annually. Worked on the virtual herbarium project with the horticultural staff on virtualizing the herbarium to an online database through an IMLS grant. Helped with design efforts on the new science pyramid building to show off an interactive display of the steppe climate regions around the world. Contributed over 1,000 volunteer hours since 2007.
            

    
    

    
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Oversee Associated Content's creative vision and all aspects of print and web design projects relating to the brand. This includes AC’s front-end website designs, (associatedcotnent.com, partner.associatedcontent.com, etc.) UI/UX designs, B2B decks, conference signage, marketing/PR materials, etc.

As AC’s creative lead, I’ve helped developed relationships with many agencies representing tier 1 brands and have successfully managed my creative resources from concept to completion of the projects demonstrating strong leadership.
            

    
    

    
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Founded in 1994, the Colorado Technology Association is a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing the technology industry.  Our mission is to foster growth and opportunity for the technology industry by:

 - Engaging and unifying stakeholders to build a strong collective voice to policy makers
 - Driving influential leadership in critical areas: job creation, economic development, innovation
 - Leveraging insights and trends to help businesses optimally perform in a global marketplace
 - Ensuring Colorado’s technology companies are recognized for their leadership and innovation
            

    
    

    
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Managed product roll-outs, software versioning, platform migration and developed solid business partnerships that assisted the launch of AssociatedContent.com. Continually acquired critical experience and skills that allowed for the following key accomplishments:
 
Developed a custom publishing platform allowing for web and wireless publication of user-generated content.

Assisted in the development of Associated Content's Yield Management System - a homegrown analytic tool used to automatically (1) select optimal ad partners; (2) predict content shelf life; (3) estimate ROI on any content acquisitions; (4) dynamically generate optimal "meta" data for published web content and (5) organize and publish seasonal content. (Patent pending)

Emerging technology analysis: For finding innovate ways to deliver content via web and wireless devices.

Viral marketing techniques: For boosting page views, content submissions and user registrations.

Effective SEO on text, image, audio and video content for increased discoverability on the web and effectively monetizing content libraries.

Advanced functionality analysis of online products: Allowing for the roll-out of "sticky" user interfaces leading to effectively increasing click-through rates on both advertisements and related inventory.

Content syndication: Used to maximize web presence with custom feeds for both third-party sites and vertical domains.
            

    
    

    
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My work included the design and implementation of a “calendar application”. The framework built is now used by all 18 Scripps Howard Newspaper sites as well as FineLiving.com, FoodNetwork.com and HGTV.com. My responsibilities also included the construction and maintenance of a content management system using TCL/TK (Oracle DB), and the design of a GUI using Vignette, Flash MX, Perl and JavaScript.

“Leonardo is central to the maintenance and development of the Rocky’s Web site. He has met every challenge we’ve given him. He has been quick to pick up on journalism style and practice. He juggles several different projects at any given time. He is always cooperative with the staff. And he is always abreast of the latest industry trends and eager to learn new technology. Leonardo has taken the lead in maintaining and improving our site’s interactive applications. Most notably over the past two years, Leonardo has helped in the development of our election, Rocky Preps, Nightlife and census applications.” – Mike Noe, Internet News Editor
            

    
    

    
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Leonardo De La Rocha🇺🇸