Practice with purpose: my story.

LEAD Product designeR

Edenred USA (Sep 2021-Present)

Senior Product designer & Team Lead

Fiserv (Mar 2021-Sep 2021)

UX/UI Designer

Fiserv (Apr 2019-Mar 2021)

Small Business Owner

LA Performing Arts (Aug 2015-Dec 2018)
Sold business at 500% ROI

Hi. My name is Alyssa. I’m a product designer with over 8 years of applied experience and a wide breadth of knowledge that has helped me successfully lead multiple products and key features to market.

I apply my skills and knowledge of design patterns, trends, analytics, statistics, psychology, and the learned understanding of people’s behaviors from research and the trials and tribulations of running a business to create products that look pristine and feel natural.

I believe in pursuing purpose over passion within one’s work. Purpose fuels you through hard times when motivation is low. I bring a strong sense of purpose to every project and opportunity.

Design EXPERIENCE

I began designing web pages over 10 years ago, honing my skills on small projects and freelance work. While working at a local small business in San Antonio, TX, I got firsthand experience in redesigning a B2C website. I updated and sustained the website while learning from customer feedback and analytics. In 2015, I purchased the company.

My first year as a business owner, I began teaching myself UX design skills and became the first performing arts studio in the area to introducing online registration to classes in the entire city of San Antonio. After that success, I began self teaching UX/UI Design to understand how to improve my business’ website using site analytics and metrics.

I sold the business in December 2018 at a 500% ROI with over 200 clients and 18 staff members. I then began my official transition into Product Design.

I was hired at Fiserv April 2019. In June 2020, I introduced an organization-wide research initiative to the design team and leadership, and began leading major research efforts within the org.

I designed 3 full products from the ground up and followed them into their successful MVP launch, continuing to work on feature updates and enhancements. I have worked on designing start-to-finish flows and complicated back-office products. I have contributed to the creation and maturity of our design system language from initial planning to its first release to designers and developers.

I began leading a team of 5 designers March 2021 working on 8 connected products within our B2B product suite in our journey of introducing new products and enhancing current ones based on research, iterating, and customer feedback.

In September 2021, I joined Edenred USA to help launch a new product — a market disrupting fleet card solution that we later named Edenred Essentials. I began my tenure by creating a design system and establishing a unified design language. I worked on key modules of our web application and native mobile apps and designed complex end to end flows. Edenred Essentials went to market in June 2022. I collaborated closely with our product, marketing, credit and engineering teams as the principal designer for a small business credit application and back-office credit decisioning tool.

I established research processes and led customer interviews, created and managed surveys, synthesized and presented research data and helped guide our product roadmap and introduce low effort/high reward quick wins for our customers as well as prioritize larger level feature modifications based on research findings.

I was nominated and chosen for Edenred’s global leadership program in May 2023 alongside 24 other candidates out of a pool of over 10,000 employees.

Edenred usa

I designed and helped successfully bring a new product, Edenred Essentials, to market in June 2022. Among my work on Essentials, I designed the small business credit application, a back-office credit decisioning tooling, homepage dashboards, an online billing system, and card ordering modules.

I established research processes and spearheaded our first customer research. I ran user interviews, created surveys and synthesized results, and modified designs based on feedback from usability testing.

I worked closely with our marketing, credit, product, engineering, legal and finance teams to successfully test and launch key feature within the product’s young timespan.

For specific examples of work, please reach out.

Fiserv

Working in Fiserv’s digital lending and origination org, I have lead the design creation of two revolutionary products from the ground-up: digital credit card and line of credit lending applications.

I led an organization-wide research initiative to bring research methods into our product design and requirements gathering, pushing to stay ahead of trends while creating an accessible product that truly reflects the people’s needs. Because we operated under a B2B2c model, it was imperative to understand the needs of not just the end-users, but also the stakeholders for each financial institution.

Operating under a scaled agile framework, I worked closely with product managers to gather requirements, my design team to create, test, and iterate, and the development team to ensure that designs can be created seamlessly to meet proper deadlines.

For specific examples of work, please reach out.

LA Performing arts

The goal: easy to navigate information on classes, schedule, and pricing and to integrate an online registration system.

Texas Climbers Coalition

Growing the membership and footprint of a 501(c)3 nonprofit that advocates for access and helps maintain climbing areas in Texas.

My design tools.

Sketch

My design process.

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Retrieve the requirements

Talk with business analysts, product owner, and product manager to understand the feature’s scope and requirements.

Bolster the business objectives

Understand and embrace the work’s business objectives prior to beginning design work.

plan the process

Use user personas, information from previous user interviews, or knowledge about the customer base to plan out the jobs to be done and create a storyboard.

Whittle the wireframes

Start fleshing out the wireframes and explore interactions and components that will need to be utilized. Run exploratory research and search through resources and articles on psychology principles to make sure that you’re choosing the best path for the user and maintaining integrity in the experience.

Design and Discuss

Create the final high-fidelity designs. Review with other designers, and then review again with the product team and developers. Iterate as needed to finalize the designs into a deliverable state that is ready for dev to build.

Personal and work values.

Diligence.

bravery.

Selflessness.

Both personal and work ethic comes from within, and it stems from being diligent. Not breaking routines, following through with commitments, pushing ones limits to meet goals. They all are rooted in diligence.

The bravest moments tend to be inspired by taking the leap into hard, scary, uncomfortable experiences. Most of the time, the outcome isn’t the reward but rather, the experience of having been brave, is. The hardest choices are typically the right ones to make, and the ones that require the most bravery. Initiating a tough conversation, pushing the limits of comfort, being vulnerable. It all stems from bravery. 

Outdoor ethics espouse the principle of LNT, or “leave no trace”. Take it a step further, and you have what I call LNT+: “leave things better than you found them”. Pick up trash when you see it. Educate when you can. Create opportunities for betterment even when you’re not present. 

Selflessness is LNT+. Small gestures of selflessness where we put others over ourselves is true leadership and inspires to leave the world a little better than it was before.