It’s been my experience that designers work better when we work together. Throughout my career I’ve advocated for building a strong design community, and I’ve always been ready, willing, and excited both to learn from others and to share my own experiences with my colleagues.

This began at Tellme Networks, where I was lucky enough to collaborate with many of the best conversation designers in the business. As we integrated into the larger Microsoft design community, I found new opportunities to learn and collaborate across teams, and took those experiences with me to Intel, where I learned from an even wider range of designers including industrial and visual design specialists.

At Amazon, I found another thriving design community. I worked to build on this strength both at the local level, organizing meetups and presentations for Amazon designers in the SF Bay Area, as well as in our specialty, helping coordinate and presenting regularly at our semiannual Conversation Design Summit on topics related to my work and to the challenges we were facing as a discipline.

In addition, I made significant contributions to the curriculum for two versions of a conversation design training program at Amazon that was used to train several hundred designers, product managers, and engineers on the basics of conversation design.