I make things that advocate for good design.
When working as a digital product designer, or a design team leader, frequent sacrifices end up being made in the spirit of Agile delivery, teamwork, and experimentation.
Perfection is one. Idealism is another. Fulfillment and self worth... do they have to go too?
Processing my own tech worker burnout has helped me put into words the whys of some of the most frequent Design-Product, Design-Developer, Design-{Stakeholder} breakdowns.
So far I've given talks like "How to Support Your Designer", "Finding The Causal Why", and "Design Thinking for Business". This is just the beginning. I am in the process of researching and writing my first book, creating my first course, and developing a membership community for design thinkers and innovators.
"Design = Intentionality During the Act of Creation"
- Alison Ostendorf
PORTFOLIO of recent WORKplaces
Director of Design for a Mortgage Tech Enterprise SaaS Platform
As the founding designer at this venture-backed San Francisco startup, I lead all aspects of Design over 3.5 years as the company grew from Seed stage to Series B.
During that time, the company found product market fit, grew from 2(ish) customers to over 80 enterprise accounts, heavily recruited in order to support 5 very active Agile development teams, launched and monetized new features and products that now are considered to be leading "the future of the mortgage tech industry".
Chief Product Officer for a B2C personal relationship manager mobile app
As co-founder and product owner, I worked with a growing team to build an easy to use mobile app that allows a user to remember who they met, where, and why; and to take relevant action on that knowledge over time.
Through the course of the project, we designed and implemented custom UI component concepts that allowed a dense set of available information to be shown as relevant and when needed.
Founder of a calendar for the tech community
Starting with the growing tech community of Houston, we are creating a community-based calendar that is accessible to everyone.
With one place to see all the events in your community, it's easy to feel like you belong.
A good Product leader incorporates Design thinking whenever intentional creation is needed. Which is at the beginning.