Designer, Engineering Team Lead, and DEI Facilitator at EarthShift Global

I stewarded a commercial software product from concept to launch.

When I joined EarthShift Global, our CEO had a dream for an app that would enable product designers to predict and minimize the environmental impacts of the products they design using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). As her first software-focused hire within the company, I took the lead on design research and the creative process. I was almost immediately managing up, which the CEO requested due to her limited bandwidth – I asked her for feedback and signoffs, and kept the project moving. I subsequently co-lead on hiring, eventually bringing on a Chief Technology Officer (CTO). The CTO and I built a 6-person team, and collaborated as peers on team culture development and project management. In September of 2024, we publicly launched our product, a SaaS web app, to an extremely enthusiastic reception by industry leaders. You can try our app, MatterPD, today. 

Outside of my work on software, I founded the company’s DEI Facilitator role, and launched the company's first culture survey and DEI working group. I mentored a colleague at the beginning of her UI Design journey. On the side, I worked directly with consulting clients to create excel-based tools that enabled them to better explore large LCA models of their supply chains, and presented on the application of Human-Centered Design in LCA at the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment conference. 

Project Background & Design Research

MatterPD is a SaaS platform that makes Life-Cycle Assessment accessible for product designers, particularly in the early stages of product development.  

Background & Motivation 

LCA is a technique typically used by expert practitioners (often with advanced degrees in environmental science) to quantitatively evaluate the environmental impacts of a product. LCAs generally account for impacts from “cradle to grave”, i.e., during resource extraction, manufacture, transportation, use, and disposal/recycling. There are several major limitations with the existing software tools for performing LCA: 

They are difficult to learn and use, particularly for non-expert audiences (such as our users), because: 

• The terminology is inaccessible 

• The UI is dated and unintuitive 

• Errors and software malfunctions are common 

• The results are difficult to interpret 

They are poorly suited to early-stage design because there is no room for uncertainty in the entered data. Product designers, particularly in the early stages of design, often are not completely certain about:

• Which materials will be used 

• The quantities of materials 

• How a design might change over the course of the prototyping/testing process 

Design Research & Exploratory Prototyping

This project started as a collaboration between the Empower Lab at Dartmouth College, an environmental consultancy called EarthShift Global (ESG) that conducts LCAs, and a product development firm called Synapse. While studying at Dartmouth, I was an intern of the Empower Lab, funded by ESG. 

During this internship, I conducted self-directed design research on the experiences of expert LCA practitioners: Ten, 30-minute interviews, which I synthesized into a design brief. The brief was centered around a detailed journey map describing the users’ thought processes, with embedded needs and “how might we” questions to kick off the subsequent creative processes. It also included personas, UI/UX design ideas, directions for future research, and a review of my research process. I refined the document by requesting feedback from my lab’s professor and from leaders at ESG. The brief excited company leaders and sparked interesting discussion about what they might develop next.  

I then leveraged design insights from my research in order to create a high-resolution, interactive prototype using JavaScript, React, and Material-UI. I also facilitated focus groups with the designers at Synapse in order to get feedback which I used iterate on the prototype. 

On the basis of this work, I co-authored a published academic paper in the ACM Journal of Computing and Sustainable Societies: EcoSketch: promoting sustainable design through iterative environmental assessment during early-stage product development 

Hiring a Team  

When I was subsequently hired full time at EarthShift Global, I was their first software-focused employee, so I reported directly to our CEO, Lise Lauren. My first task was to build an in-house software team - something neither I nor Lise had ever done before. After discussing our objectives and the company’s typical hiring strategies, I began developing a hiring process. I developed the process to align with business objectives, technical needs, Lise's style, and my values. I had just been through a long job search, so the typical applicant experience was fresh in my mind, and I was determined to create a better one. This led to the need for me to discuss some tricky and sensitive topics with Lise quite early in our relationship: the ethics of different systems for determining salary, “affirmative action hiring,” etc. - it was a great opportunity to practice having challenging conversations in a way that grows a relationship rather than threatens it. I'm grateful for the wealth of leadership and hiring knowledge that she shared with me through this experience, and for being open to my ideas. In the end, we persevered through the ambiguity and hard practical-ethical dilemmas and did make a series of successful hires together in a manner that I feel proud of.  This process culminated in hiring our CTO, Ismael Velasco, who has become a core mentor and dear friend. 

Continued Design Research, Creative Processes, UI/UX 

While building the team, and throughout my time at EarthShift Global, I lead the Design Research and UI/UX Design efforts for the web platform. I conducted dozens of interviews and focus groups, synthesized learnings, defined terms, facilitated group brainstorms, developed prototypes, and collected feedback on these prototypes, all in an iterative way. Through this process, I got to work with my colleagues (very closely with the CEO), as well as sustainability professionals working in a wide range of client industries.  

Engineering Team Leadership: Culture, Norms, Project Management, and Workflow Development 

For me, leadership is about serving a group through facilitation, enabling the group to achieve common goals aligned with collective values. I do my best to facilitate the collective design of the team experience. This means not only making space to discuss our individual values and motivations, but intentionally aligning our measured performance indicators to them, and building our collaboration processes around them.  

I’m proud of the specific ways I facilitated the development of this alignment: We iterated on our communication norms over a long time and eventually created efficient collaboration within a team spread between the USA, Mexico, and Slovakia, while facilitating healthy work-life balance. We adopted Shape Up (an Agile-adjacent process) with its long-form 8-week build cycles, in order to adapt to the psychological needs of some of our engineers, and promote developer agency. We leveraged technical tools such as Linear for project management, which became our source of truth, and linked Slack, Survicate (embedded user feedback), Sentry (error handling) and GitHub, and providing a low-friction, high-flow, developer experience.   

DEI & Culture Survey 

When I started at EarthShift Global, the leadership believed that inclusivity and equity were things they had already completed, rather than ongoing challenges. As the first genderqueer employee of the company and a lifelong student of equity and power dynamics, I knew firsthand that this was not the case, and I could see that many of my colleagues were experiencing challenges as well.  

Leveraging my close relationship with the CEO, I built buy-in and facilitated the co-development of my company’s first culture survey. I also developed and facilitated a company-wide event to collectively synthesize and reflect on the results of that survey. This work led to an awakening among the leadership team and new interest in investing in our company’s culture. It paved the way for me to establish the company’s first ever DEI Facilitator position, and DEI working group. This working group, called the “Values & Processes Alignment Group”, is a diverse group within a diverse company – a space where individuals share their experiences, and the group accordingly develops company policy change initiatives. Several of my colleagues have independently approached me after my departure from the company, specifically to thank me for leaving them with these impactful institutions.  

Mentorship & Teaching Design Skills 

The opportunity to share design skills with others always brings me joy. One of my teammates, who was responsible for our graphics, color palette, and company aesthetic, told me shortly after I helped hire her that she wanted to learn design methods. I had the pleasure of being in a mentor role for over a year. Through this collaboration, she was able to effectively take on the role of UI designer. She helped maintain our UI component library and learned how to leverage her aesthetic sensibilities to improve upon the interfaces. 

I love teaching design, and watching it empower others as it has empowered me.  I had the opportunity to teach design more formally, presenting to ~50 people at the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment conference in 2023. Several audience members shared an appreciation for the new ways of thinking and doing that I’m working to make accessible to the field. I wrote up a short version of the content as a resources page for attendees of the conference and other LCA practitioners, now public on the company website.  

Professional Development 

Service Design 

I had the opportunity to do some professional development in Service Design - the application of design thinking methodology to the scope of a complex service, rather than a product. The service design mindset resonates with me and my systems-oriented brain, which has never truly focused only on a single product at all, but always looked at the product in its system and service context. I took classes on Service Design with the Interaction Design Foundation and IDEO U. I also built a service blueprint of EarthShift Global’s consulting service, which is ready to support the thoughtful growth of our company and service offerings in the future. 

Management Training 

I’m grateful to have been a part of a discussion group of four managers-in-training, led by our CEO. We met every other week to discuss management theory and how to handle management challenges coming up in the company. For example, when the CEO and I were working on hiring our software team, we had several discussions about it with this group. Recently, after the CEO fired an employee, she shared what she was thinking about as a manager through that process and even shared doubts about how she’d handled aspects of the situation. We were able to discuss alternative ways a manager could have acted, and the pros and cons of each. We’ve also discussed parental leave policy, company culture, and other topics. 

Launch 

We launched MatterPD at the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment conference in September of 2024, where it was received with enthusiasm from industry leaders in business and academia.  

In the fall of 2024, I began my studies for an MS in Food Systems at the University of Vermont. As a result, I decided to move on from EarthShift Global toward my next adventures.