ezCater Product Design Manager
As a Sr. Product Design Manager at ezCater, I managed and mentored a team of product designers, UX researchers and content designers, providing guidance on design best practices, helping them grow their skills, and ensuring design consistency across the product suite. I closely collaborated with cross-functional partners in product management, engineering, and marketing to prioritize and align design initiatives with product roadmaps and company objectives.
My role often played a crucial role in establishing and evolving design systems, setting high standards for usability, accessibility, and visual quality, and advocating for the customer perspective at all levels of decision-making. I was responsible for guiding the team’s efforts in user research, fostering innovation, and driving measurable business outcomes.
My core responsibility was overseeing both the Corporate Solutions domain and the Supply and SaaS Operations domain. The Corporate Solutions domain was compile of two product teams, Relish and Corporate Accounts. The Supply and SaaS Operations domain was compiled of 4 product teams, Integrations, Delivery & Reliability, Marketing Programs and ezManage platform.
My responsibilities
Fost collaboration
A crucial responsibility of any design leader is to foster collaboration within the design team. I built our design review and design collaboration meetings around a principle of providing diverse perspectives. The design collaboration activities encourage cross-functional thinking for all levels of design. I also lead our design team quarterly retros, which strengthens our collaborative environment by allowing the team to reflect on successes, challenges, and ways we can improve our processes. Together, these activities build a culture of shared ownership, trust, and creative problem-solving.
Cross-functional domain leadership
As a design leader spanning two domains, I prioritize seamless communication and collaboration with cross-functional leaders in product, analytics, and engineering. Each week, we gather to review our team’s progress, align on upcoming plans, and tackle any blockers that might slow us down. Together, we’re responsible not only for driving our team’s success but for cultivating a healthy, motivated environment. By consistently tracking team morale alongside our goals and outcomes, we ensure that we’re always advancing toward meaningful, impactful results.
Driving innovation
I thrive in environments that embrace calculated risks to make a meaningful impact. Within the design team, we hold monthly innovation sprints—dedicated days where we dive into fresh opportunities for our products. Each team zeroes in on customer feedback or key metrics, collaborating to generate innovative concepts that push our products forward. This focused, creative energy not only drives our product evolution but also strengthens our ability to deliver real value to the organization and our customers.
Building a diverse design team
One of the most rewarding aspects of being a design manager is the opportunity to build and shape our design, research, and content teams. When I joined ezCater in November 2022 as the fourth design hire, our VP of Design had established a foundational team of Senior Product Design Managers, each of whom was tasked with developing and expanding their respective teams. This allowed us to craft a team structure aligned with our vision for driving product growth across all functions. By March 2024, we had grown from a team of four to a robust team of 22, encompassing product designers, researchers, and content designers at levels from Associate to Staff.
Establish design leadership coffee chats
Our design team had been growing at a rapid pace. As design leads, we needed a space to bring up processes, design principles, planning, challenges and wins. I established a weekly design leadership coffee chat, which brought together all design, research and content leaders and staff levels. This was an essential gathering to get aligned as a leadership team, so that we could communicate up or down our recommendations, success, or problems that our team was facing.
Leadership updates
At ezCater, regular reporting and performance updates are essential. I dedicate about 40% of my time to documentation and communicating team progress. The remaining 60% is focused on managing team performance, driving design strategy, overseeing execution, and other critical responsibilities. The way we shared and updated our leadership team frequently changed, so it was important that we stayed flexible to the newest approach requested from our executive leadership team.
Process improvements
As a design manager, I continually assess the effectiveness of our processes, tools, and documentation to ensure they align with our goals. At ezCater, we shifted from a "move fast and break things" approach to a “move fast and learn from mistakes” approach, which values speed without sacrificing a consistent and thoughtful process. This mindset was particularly beneficial on the Acorns team, where we rapidly iterated on meal card concepts while actively gathering insights. Through this process, we discovered that this new product didn’t align with customer needs, and we made the decision to pause development. This allowed us to redirect our focus based on real-world feedback, improving our strategy for future initiatives.
Design system
Our design system has evolved significantly over time. Initially, we had a rigid, traditional structure that our teams became heavily reliant on, but we lacked the resources to scale and maintain it. In Q4 2023, I collaborated with a Principal Engineering Manager to reevaluate the system and proposed moving to a more adaptable model that better serves both designers and engineers. Together, we designed an open-contribution system focused on flexibility, consistency, and accessibility. I appointed a Staff Product Designer to lead the transition from our Recipe Design System to the new Ingredients Design System using the atomic system as guidance, while engineering updated their framework using Tapas/Tailwind. Given resource constraints, we plan to supplement our system by investing in a component library.
Accessibility
Accessibility is an important and sometimes legal requirement. While many companies do not dedicate enough time into addressing accessibility issues, at ezCater, we made this one of our top priorities for our design team. We partnered with Level Access to scan and identify accessibility risks across our products. Myself and the other Sr. Product Design Manager took ownership of this partnership with Level Access. We also appointed two product designers to collaborate with engineering to identify and fix any accessibility issue for our entire customer-facing products. I set up monthly async check-ins with each accessibility designer to ensure we are making progress towards reaching our accessibility goals.
Design Strategy + Stakeholder Mngt
Design strategy requires a holistic view that considers our partners, product objectives, and market opportunities. While I am responsible for the broader, long-term strategy for our domain, I’m equally committed to helping my individual product teams build near-term roadmaps that align with larger organizational goals. This dual focus ensures a cohesive, well-supported design vision that keeps pace with evolving user needs and market demands. As part of my focus, I am constantly creating, editing and commenting on product strategy documents and roadmaps. I meet regularly with my product director to provide feedback and get alignment on our direction.
Design sprints + planning
A key responsibility for a design manager is to enhance team performance and streamline execution. For my teams, I leverage Jira to build design sprints and run weekly planning sessions. While other planning tools might offer more design-specific features, Jira enables us to link our design epics directly to engineering’s, integrating research and design tickets smoothly into the engineering backlog. Overseeing two domains, this setup has proven invaluable in maintaining visibility on both current projects and upcoming initiatives, ensuring alignment across our cross-functional teams.
Mentorship + career growth
Another key aspect of my manager role is to mentor and coach, not just my direct reports, but other designers across the team. Upon hiring a new designer onto the team, we have them go through a strengths finder. This initiates their strengths and weaknesses, so that I as their manager can establish a starting point. Upon a 45 days review, I compare their initial report with 360 peer feedback and my observations. From there I will create a career growth plan. I have weekly check-ins with my reports to gauge how they are performing. I either use my 1:1 time or a separate meeting to focus on providing guidance for their career at ezCater.
In 2025, I merged all sprint planning over to Coda where all design, content, research planning is in one central location.
In Q1 of 2024, I tested sprint planning within This was easier to connect epics between design and engineering boards.
I led several of our quarterly design team retros. The design leadership team acted and reported on feedback after every retro.
I was responsible for migrating and deprecating the Recipe design system to the new Tapas/Tailwind and Ingredients design system.
In Q2 2024, I changed 1:1s to include a new reporting document for clear insights into progress, upcoming plans, and any blockers.