Hi, I’m Katrina. I love solving real pain points for customers and making complex products simple and delightful to use. I do my best work with kind, motivated people who aren’t satisfied with the status quo.
I bring almost two decades of experience leading design, mostly at venture-backed B2B SaaS companies. I’ve led teams from 1 to 100, at companies from Series B to public with $20M to $3B in revenue, and I’ve been lucky to be part of two IPOs.
I build happy teams that genuinely enjoy working together and have each other’s backs. That comes from thoughtful hiring, clear career ladders, strong mentorship, and rituals like retrospectives where real input turns into action.
I put designers, PMs, and engineers in direct contact with customers. Paired with usage data, that lets us ship early, learn from real signals, and iterate fast.
I don’t settle for the status quo. I bring cohesion to the end-to-end journey across products, the website, and other customer touchpoints, with a strong design system, high standards for visual design, and regular journey audits to find friction. I keep challenging my team and the product to improve, and I make gaps and opportunities visible.
AI is changing how we work, and I’m an early adopter and advocate for how much faster it can help us deliver value to customers. I bring emerging AI tools and processes to my teams so we stay efficient and fast, without giving up judgment or craft.
For me, a design artifact isn’t the job. I measure success by shipped experiences that work, with real impact for customers and the business. If we miss the mark, we learn early and iterate quickly.
I create shared language, effective processes, and clear definitions of success across product, design, and engineering, so everyone moves in the same direction. I role model it by running effective meetings, keeping direction clear, sharing status transparently, and following up on owners and action items.
AI is changing what designers make, how they make it, and how they work with product and engineering. I’ve led a team through that shift while keeping designers engaged and productive.
Adopting AI tools early and as they evolved, from content guidelines and research synthesis to prototyping in code against production repos and the design system, with KPIs to track adoption along the way.
Agent experiences, platform UI patterns for AI, and the new challenge of designing for non-deterministic outcomes around intent rather than exact UI.
Now that anyone can generate a decent UI with AI, the lines between design, product, and engineering blur. I help teams redefine who owns what, and where design adds the most value.
Katrina fostered a space where those who were tinkering with the latest AI tools could share what was working and not working in order to enable the whole team on emerging AI design workflows.
I grew SendGrid’s UX team from 2 to 20 across product design, research, web, design systems, and content design, through a 2017 IPO and a $3B acquisition by Twilio.
At Kong, I moved 100% of designers to AI-assisted prototyping, got designers shipping their own pull requests, and led design for Kong’s AI agent.
As VP of UX at Twilio, I unified three design teams and grew the org to 100, leading directors and managers across 20 business units. I pooled business-unit funding to build Paste, Twilio’s accessible design system, and drove adoption across the platform, deprecating several outdated front-end frameworks and systems.
As SVP of Product & Design at Hologram, I led product management and design, ran our brand, website, and online store, and sat on the senior executive team. I know both sides of the PM–design partnership.
When Kong rebranded around electric lime, I led an effort to adapt the brand for a product context: new day and night themes, a healthier design system, and high-contrast mode, released in stages to protect quality.
I led our team as early adopters of AI, picking up new tools as they got better. We started with content guidelines and a custom GPT to apply them, used AI for research planning and synthesis, and then prototyped in Claude Code, connected to our production code repos and design system, along with the Figma MCP server. A reusable starter kit, hands-on workshops, and 1:1 coaching got every designer to a working prototype, and designers started shipping their own pull requests.
I pooled funding across business units to build Paste, an accessible design system, and drove adoption across the platform, deprecating several outdated front-end frameworks and systems. Paste was adopted by 100% of business units within two years, and with its new, modern visual language, happiness with our visual design rose from 10% to 70% in our design health survey.
She took a small design team and transformed it into a high-performing organization that meaningfully elevated the quality of our products. She became one of my most trusted partners in leading Product at Kong.
I had the pleasure of working closely with Katrina at Kong, where she took a small design team and transformed it into a high-performing organization that meaningfully elevated the quality of our products. What I admire most about Katrina is her combination of strong design leadership, clear thinking, and an incredibly positive, collaborative approach. She became one of my most trusted partners in leading Product at Kong, helping us navigate complex organizational and product challenges with clarity and calm confidence. I would highly recommend her to any product or design leader looking to build, scale, or transform their design organization.
I’m open to VP and Head of Design roles, as well as advisory and fractional engagements.
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