United States

Product Design

UX Design

UI/ Visual Design

Branding and Identity Design

Interaction Design

UX Testing

UX Research

Linda Ward

Staff Product Designer

Medium

Public Speaking

Communication

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Time management

Critical-thinking

Empathy

Team player

Organisation skills

Presentation skills

Conflict resolution

Leadership

Project management

Accessibility

Design systems

Postman

UserTesting

Webflow

Zeplin

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Photoshop

Asana

Canva

ChatGPT

Figma

InVision

Java

JavaScript

Mailchimp

Miro

Adobe Creative Suite

Adobe After Effects

Sketch

Stakeholder management

Introduce yourself, define mentoring expectations and goals. Learn and grow together.

General mentorship

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

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

Being a woman in tech

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

How to maintain trust, commitment, accountability deliver results while handling conflict

Avoiding common dysfunctions

How to determine what is a good balance of skill sets for your organization's needs

Building balanced teams

Decision making as a software engineer or lead - how to become better at making the right choices

Making better tech choices

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

Learn the career path and progression for product managers.

Product management 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

How to define and execute a successful launch and managing stakeholders expectations. (eg. MVP)

Launching new products or features

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

Identify and define potential product problems and generating possible solutions.

Identifying problems vs solutions

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

Presenting your work with impact

Tips on how to work and collaborate with designers.

Working with designers

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 set up product analytics and metrics to track success?

Leveraging Product Analytics

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 define an ambitious product vision and how to best communicate it to stakeholders?

Creating a product vision

Tips on how to work and collaborate with engineers and developers.

Working with engineers

What is a successful user onboarding flow and how to achieve it?

Onboarding new users

Best practices for documenting projects, epics, and stories

Writing product requirement documents

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

Conducting effective customer interviews

Leadership in Design: Led numerous high-impact initiatives, guiding design projects from concept to execution, and delivering solutions that address complex challenges faced by technical & risk personas.

Strategic Vision: Inspiring and aligning cross-functional teams with a clear design vision, ensure that design efforts are not only realistic but also aligned with broader business objectives while delivering user value. Assess end-to-end user experience to identify user and business opportunities. 

Collaboration & Communication: Foster effective collaboration with product managers, engineers, and stakeholders has facilitated productive discussions and propelled projects forward.

Technical Acumen: Leveraging my experience with component-based design systems and proficiency in tools like Figma. Collaborate effectively with engineering teams to ensure innovative and feasible designs.

Passion for Innovation: Thrive on cultivating a culture of continuous innovation, embracing failure as an opportunity to learn and grow, and amplifying team culture to foster experimentation and creativity.

Design Sprints & Workshops: Led design sprints for most important initiatives and workshops to streamline processes, enhance collaboration, and drive innovation. Successfully guiding teams from chaos to collaboration, resulting in improved productivity and creativity.

• Develop and maintain the interactive GUX 2.0 FMCC & LAFS Design Systems to be used in ongoing development of new features and to iterate existing functionality. Solicit and provide feedback on the Design System execution. 

• Evangelize the Design Systems throughout the organization and provide Design System training for nearly 200 designers, engineers and business colleagues. Created 1500+ components, in 9 coding languages, AA compliant and decreased end-to-end design and development time by nearly 30%.

• Continuously conduct end-to-end audits of UI, visuals and design system and solve for design discrepancies. 

• Direct UIX initiatives for a team of Product Designers at Ford Credit, develop their product design, design process acumen and oversee the execution of the Design Systems. Oversee the UI from conception to launch in partnership with the product team.

• Establish Ford Credit’s design standards that reflect Ford Motor Company’s brand standards and UIX vision. 

• Work cross-functionally with product teams including design, product management, content strategy, on-site engineers, off-shore engineers, marketing and legal to ensure a holistic approach to all digital touch points. Great at building consensus in design initiatives. 

• Highlights of Results: 10x increase in “My Next Vehicle” sales by Ford Credit account holders; 25% decrease in Support Calls, 15% account sign up increase, 15% Online credit application increase.

• Lead UI and UX designer for Account Manager launch in 2019. Won J.D. Power Award for Best Automotive Consumer Website Experience 2019.

• Directed the re-design of the company’s website. 

• Mentored, coached and directed junior designers to ensured that La-Z-Boy brand was consistently executed. 

• Designed a customer-centric environment encouraging user engagement and customer behavior influence using user research, definition, documentation, UX analysis, customer experience mapping, development of persona, development of brand voice for all digital channels, authored digital styling guide for responsive mobile and desktop websites. 

Results
      •     20% less bounce rate
      •     Overall increase in quality traffic and longer site visits by 35%
      •     3x increase in home accessory sales per month
      •     Increased Design Services sales by approximately 50% in 8 months with brand-new micro-site that I oversaw UX direction from research to final UI 
      •     Overall increase in website sales by 15% during my tenure at La-Z-Boy.

• Implement visual ideas with the creative and account teams for corporate branding materials including print, digital and social media.

• Prepare mock-ups for presentation boards.

• Produce final assets for routing and exercise expert level production skills. Pay strong attention to production, image optimization and typography (tracking, leading).

• Creative Director, Designer, Illustrator of branding materials including logos, websites, mobile apps, digital/print assets etc.

• Develop brands and create concepts while overseeing all areas of design process: concept to final production.

Coordinate load-in and load-out of equipment, develop and adhere to a strict time schedule for a crew of 3-20, troubleshoot and solve problems and assist designer.  Reorganized and repaired entire catalog of lighting equipment and accessories.

Linda Ward🇺🇸

About Linda Ward

Expertise

What mentees say