Leadership – Sari Harris

Design leadership

I have spent the majority of my career as a designer and leader at well-known companies and brands such as The Economist, Scholastic, College Board, Infor, and TD Ameritrade.

I'm currently at London Stock Exchange Group focused on the strategy for workflows across LSEG products and Microsoft products.

In 2016, I spent 6 months at Pivotal Labs (now Tanzu Labs) for TD Ameritrade and subsequently evangelized innovation processes to bring new investing products to market at TD Ameritrade until the Schwab acquisition in 2019.

Here's an overview of my design practice and philosophy.

High level
Design 

Agile/Lean UX practice to integrate with cross-functional teams
Regular usability research sessions with customers to inform feature and product direction
Design thinking workshops and collaboration sessions to generate ideas, explore strategies, and solve problems

Leadership 

Recruit, hire, manage, and mentor design talent
Change management
Relationship building

In-Depth
Design Leader

Product Design + Design Thinking
Design thinking workshops and collaboration sessions form the base of the design practice. These are used to generate ideas, explore strategies, and solve problems. Regular user research sessions are run to learn how and why customers use products and refine designs-in-progress.

Management of the Design Teams
As a manager, I keep the momentum and uphold the quality of team output. To this end, I organize and facilitate regular design critiques, design studios, and breakout sketching sessions to generate ideas, gain consensus, and evaluate design solutions. To further my designers' careers, I map designers’ personal goals to business goals to provide growth opportunities.

User Research & Research Operations
To keep our regular user research sessions going, I create research schedules to support product roadmaps and work with our research team to recruit participants.

I have the following in-depth design-research skills:

craft user scripts,
moderate sessions
write reports & communicate research findings

To make the research process sustainable for each team, I have trained my designers to run research with their teams.

Design Operations + Program Management
I run the design operations for multiple agile backlogs and act as a liaison for vendors/partners - this involves allocating designers to features/backlogs as needed.

User Story Map
Created to better understand the long term product roadmap

Open to hearing about new opportunities
Get in touch via LinkedIn