Own end-to-end design for the Engagement team, and set the conventions two adjacent teams now build against: navigation, workbench layout, and the design–eng handoff standard.

• Lead UX research operations: recruited and ran studies with five enterprise accounts, synthesized findings into structured insight documents, and traced eight roadmap influences directly to customer input.
• Set cross-team standards two adjacent teams build against: one workbench pattern replacing several divergent layouts, a navigation rubric adopted as default reasoning, and zero ambiguous handoffs left in the tickets.
• Designed a persistent in-product AI agent: three confidence tiers and four explainability tiers built into the component system, plus three fully designed degraded states, so the interface stays trustworthy when the model is wrong.
• Authored three lifecycle phase gates from a source-based audit of five recurring handoff failures, and run “Designin’ With Dani”, the biweekly design and engineering sync feeding them, kept going at every company since 2020.
• Designed complex interaction systems: A/B variant flows, campaign state navigation, and bulk editing for large link libraries, migrating two features with zero breaking changes for live customers.
• Steward the Auxin design system: authored specs for new components, wrote Linear tickets for design–eng handoff, and drove refinement quality across the team.
• Built Branch Inner Circle, an enterprise customer program, from zero-to-launch: scaled across three global regions at 100% founding-cohort retention, with eight roadmap influences traced back to it.

Designed for a global sports video and analytics platform used by coaches and athletes across pro, collegiate, and youth: expert users with high stakes.

• Ran user research with sports organizations across pro, collegiate, and youth, validating concepts and surfacing usability issues before they reached build.
• Led cross-functional design sprints, delivering wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity screens in close partnership with engineering, product, and data teams.
• Ran the standing design and engineering sync, reviewing in-flight work with the engineers building it before decisions were locked.
• Worked with PMs and engineering managers on scope and sequencing, turning research findings into decisions the team could commit to.
• Maintained design-system components and helped shape design-critique culture across a distributed design org.

Designed enterprise software for building-materials distributors: data-heavy, workflow-dependent interfaces where understanding the business was a prerequisite to designing anything.

• Ran discovery research with distributors and internal teams, mapping how the business actually ran before proposing anything.
• Built journey maps and flows, and produced detailed wireframes and prototypes for internal and client-facing tools.
• Held the same design and engineering sync, putting open questions in front of engineers while the designs were still open to change.
• Paired with PMs and engineering managers to keep designs implementable within technical constraints without sacrificing usability.

Designed mobile and web interfaces for an ultrasonic data-transmission platform, a technically novel, hardware-adjacent product where the core challenge was making invisible behavior feel trustworthy and legible.

• Owned design across multiple client integrations, translating complex SDK capabilities into intuitive developer- and consumer-facing experiences.
• Ran usability testing with client teams and end users, checking whether behavior nobody can see still reads as trustworthy at the moment of use.
• Kept PMs and engineering managers in the same standing sync, surfacing in-flight work before decisions hardened.