A Product Designer with Range.

Hey! my name is AJ. I’m new to the UX Design space — looking for my next company.

I have a background in software sales and product development. Over the last two years, I slowly moved to the UX space while working on two early-stage startups where I did UX Research and sales discovery.

Realizing sales discovery and UX interviews overlapped in many ways; I decided to double down, completing a 3-month boot camp, Google’s design certificate, and courses in CSS/Figma.

As a new Ux Designer, I’ll bring unseen skills necessary for every evolving product design team. I don’t check the typical boxes. I spent three years in sales development and nearly five years as an Account Executive. The catch is that 80% of my time has been spent leading customer discovery and uncovering core user problems. Every decision a sales rep makes is to find the overlap between solving the customer’s problem and creating the most significant business impact.

Why? Because that is the overlap that has to happen for a sales rep to get paid. Nothing else matters.

I started curating user experiences in 2014 when I sold running shoes from the back of a Fleet Feet Sports van. I wanted to change how younger runners viewed Fleet Feet Sports (it worked for Nike). I pivoted to SaaS in 2015, working at early-stage companies selling product development services and SaaS ranging from Chat, IT security, ML, and integration.

I’m a new UX Designer that does market research like a product manager, cold calls like an SDR, and sells like an Enterprise AE. I understand when you hear UX Designers say “customers come first” and Executives say “focus on business impact.” They’re speaking the same language.

If you’re curious, below is where I come to look like an outlier among the average UX Designers.

• Define, plan, and conduct user research with current customers and potential ones ( I have the skill set to generate a backlog of qualified user interviews who fit the customer type but don’t yet use the product)
• Run dual discovery to understand customer problems and measure potential business impacts of a design decision.
• Communicate evidence-based product experiences and UI designs.
• Compile competitors and build better user experiences to win customers.
• Hit the phones when we are one meeting short of the weekly quota.