Work

Currently

I’m a lead product manager at Planning Center, where I create web-based and native mobile software for churches and their congregants.

Over the last eight years, I’ve held a variety of roles across design and product. I’ve guided the end-to-end product lifecycle, directly managed interdisciplinary teams of developers and designers, championed design systems, partnered with our marketing team on customer research and positioning, and driven cross-product strategy and cohesion initiatives, while still obsessing over visual polish, empty states, and UX microinteractions.

Each product I’ve led has come with its own set of challenges and opportunities — but what I brought to all of them was a UX-first, experience-driven approach and strong advocacy for design.

Planning Center Registrations

Hand-drawn wireframe of a registration form

Churches of all shapes and sizes use Registrations to create signups for events and opportunities as diverse as they are. Supporting this gamut of uses led to immense complexity. But to foster growth, I knew the product needed to be more accessible to new users. We needed to provide a more curated experience — opinionated with contextually appropriate flexibility.

To streamline the experience and bring clarity to overlapping feature sets while still preserving power-user workflows, we focused on clear, explicit UI — approachable but not overly magical — and progressively revealed more advanced options depending on whether that functionality was discouraged, allowed, or encouraged in a given context.

These changes were incremental and often subtle, but as we made them, we watched Registrations become the fastest-growing product in our ecosystem while still retaining our biggest customers.

Planning Center Home

Hand-drawn wireframe of repeating tasks

If the challenge of Registrations is approachability, the challenge of Home is differentiation.

Churches have a unique set of needs and their rhythms are unrelentingly cyclical. Sunday is always coming.

That’s why they have purpose-built software for things like service planning, volunteer scheduling, and event coordination. But for task management and information sharing, they’re left to piece together generic tools and manual processes.

In Home, we had the opportunity to create a collaborative workspace to meet these unserved needs. I led zero-to-one for our task management product, building common features — like repeating tasks and shared task lists — in uncommon ways and leveraging the value of our multi-product ecosystem through things like automations and relationships.

Church Center

Hand-drawn wireframe of mobile app views

Whereas Planning Center is for church staff, Church Center is for congregants — our customers’ customers. On Church Center, we offer a cohesive end-user experience by seamlessly integrating features from across our multi-product ecosystem.

Advocating for end-users in a B2B product is a unique and compelling challenge, and I’ve had the opportunity to do so from multiple vantage points: initially as the first product designer, leading design for the MVP of the mobile app and creating a cross-platform design system to unify the user experience across web and app; and now, several years later, as the product manager, building alignment across teams as we try to make an increasingly complex product feel simple to the 2.2 million people who use it every month.

Previously

Founder / Creative Director
Allie Creative • 2009-2017

Designer
Ning • 2008

Senior Web Designer
Willamette University • 2005-2007