United States

Graphic Design

UX Design

UI/ Visual Design

Service Design

Product Design

Interaction Design

UX Testing

UX Research

Service Design Research

Master of Fine Arts - MFA

Bachelor's degree

Sowmya R Iyer

Design Leader

Communication

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Time management

Critical-thinking

Empathy

Presentation skills

Stakeholder management

Leadership

Project management

Figma

Adobe Creative Suite

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

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

Lead product vision and strategy for the development of a new team dedicated to build our trade partner web & mobile tools. Driving the most important business goal to get homes ready to sell within the standards of quality, speed and cost. 

Shipped high-impact tooling experiences to streamline home operations, user workflows and deliver profitability. 

Enhanced and improved team efficiency by introducing product & and design collaboration processes and leading a team-wide design systems sprint.

Achieved critical OKRs by unifying legacy tools into modern operational platforms for flagship rider app, fleet management, and on-ground operations. Overcame ambiguity and constraints within Transit, Bikes, and Scooters team.

Influenced product strategy and vision by brainstorming ideas with product, business & engineering teams and articulating design rationale through storytelling, prototypes, research outcomes, etc

Delivered high-quality designs to comply with Lyft's accessibility, quality, and safety standards by building design systems and processes

Intensified performance & efficiency via innovation design solutions, enabling Lyft to deliver 4.5M rides, scaling 930% growth from 30k rides/week to 280k rides/week, and reducing operational costs in crucial markets like SFO & NYC. 

Streamlined workflows, decluttered content, and eradicated perceived disconnectedness to enhance user productivity, promoting user migration to the new platform.

Championed Diversity, equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and the Lyft Associate Program to empower designers facing systemic barriers.

Actively participated in recruitment activities to ensure the hiring of diverse and multi-disciplinary candidates.
Mentoring and guiding young designers/ interns into their roles. Process improvements, documenting/publishing articles, teaching workshops, and contributing to design tools.

Legends Solar allows anyone to purchase equity ownership in real, operating commercial solar panels.
Our project monitoring software, Legends Rooftop, makes it simple to understand your panel's financial return and environmental impact. Each share owned on Legends Solar has an investment profile similar to real ownership in an operating solar panel.

Senior Designer in the Operational Technology team at Lyft Bikes & Scooters 
The goal is to build the tools and systems that power everything our operators need to do, and in turn, better serve riders. Deliver the software and data necessary to allow Lyft’s Bikes and Scooters to operate the best micro-mobility solution profitably and at scale. 

The products have impacted over 1,500 operations staff across all Lyft bike and scooter markets to manage over 50,000 bikes, e-bikes, and scooters, and 4,000 stations.

Over the past 6 months I have worked on the following projects:

Biking-friendly Navigation: Improving the map/navigation experience across all bike share systems. Creating a completely new and transformational design system for “bike lanes” and “during the ride experience”. Designing new graphic assets and styles for increased interactivity and readability of the map for all users (keeping in account color-blind users). Constantly, creating working prototypes and testing them with stakeholders and beta-users for feedback followed by iterations on the design. Successfully launching the improved “Biking Experience” across Citi Bike (New York), Ford GoBike (San Francisco Bay area), Divvy (Chicago), Bluebikes (Boston Metro area), Capital Bikeshare (Washington, D.C. metro area), BIKETOWN (Portland), CoGo (Columbus, Ohio), and Nice Ride (Minneapolis), which is currently being used by over 24 million users nationwide.

Redesign Logged-in Web Experience: On the advent of Nice Ride (bike share system) launch in Minneapolis (2018), a complete redesign of the logged-in web interface was required. The project started with initial research and sorting problem areas to intervene. I have worked on creating Information Architecture for the screens, mitigating system problems to find viable solutions, creating flowcharts and logic diagrams. This was followed by constant iterations of the screen wireframes, UX flow and other business, product and engineering considerations/constraints. Generating low and high fidelity prototypes for testing and feedback. Designing a completely new graphic language/system for the new logged-in state making it compelling, easy to use, effective and communicative. 

In-app Illustrations & Animations: In order to create a  unified visual language across all systems I created compelling product illustrations and animations for web/app in collaboration with the customer, equity, marketing, and creative teams.

Worked on retail experience projects that were in-flight. Contributing towards research practices, insights and actionable concepts to create innovative retail experiences for clients

During my time in Tomorrow lab, I worked with HUGE on its client OTIS (Elevator Company). I helped in the research and finding insights for redesigning their tools and products. In-field research included site visits to OTIS Offices and workspaces to understand the user and their pain points.

Participated in a Brainstorm Project for Innovative Oral care products with Aruliden, which included understanding market scenarios, and analyzing and creating groundbreaking concepts for their then-upcoming client project.

Engaged with the representatives from the Veterans Experience Office and the New York Harbor Healthcare System (VA Hospital) to participate in a group discussion around women veterans. Topics ranged from the perception of women military in our society to their unique needs in accessing healthcare services throughout the VA system, to stakeholder ecosystem mapping—trying to identify the main players in the area, along with learning about their top needs and interactions.

I worked closely with MoMA Retail staff to create fresh and innovative products for their Design Store. I was mainly involved in pitching new ideas and creating low and high-fidelity 3D prototypes for further manufacturing. Designing packaging and constantly evolving the current designs to suit user needs.

Innovation: My responsibilities included understanding market trends in design and technology, conducting primary research and doing secondary research, understanding and deriving meaningful insights, conceptualizing, creating high fidelity wireframes and visual prototypes. 

Commercialization: Included creating POCs and working closely with counterparts and stakeholders in Samsung HQ, Seoul, South Korea. Generating Marketing Presentations, high fidelity developer assets, GUI and UI Guidelines. Resolving issues after release and updates

As the first product designer, I worked directly with the founder to craft the vision for the product, come up with our initial UI / UX patterns, and patent research, and set the company up for success. This was an incredible opportunity to make a massive and meaningful impact on the future of remote cardiac monitoring

Sowmya R Iyer🇺🇸

About Sowmya R Iyer

Expertise

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