Wayfair

Online marketplace for all things home, reaching 31 million customers by partnering with over 20,000 suppliers to generate 14.1 billion USD in revenue (2020).

Helping people find what they need to create a home they love.

My Role

Associate Director, Product Design (Suppliers)

  • Defined and communicated vision and strategy that moved teams, products, and initiatives forward via shared goals.

    • Led large, cross-functional projects that had significant and lasting impact on Wayfair’s supplier experience.

    • Built and led a high-performing product design teams responsible for Wayfair’s end-to-end supplier experience.

    • Balanced business goals with users’ needs to deliver increased engagement, retention, and top line growth.

    • Participated in senior leadership planning and status meetings, resulting in better visibility and stronger advocacy for my design team and enterprise design best practices.

    • Built relationships and processes across business units, ensuring a cohesive platform experience across all site sections.

    • Supported individual and business growth through quality coaching, ongoing feedback, and thoughtful performance management, as well as the development and achievement of quarterly professional goals (OKRs).

    • Regularly recognized team accomplishments and unified the team around positive outcomes and learning opportunities.

Results

  • Co-led and championed a future vision strategy (based on research) to allow suppliers to

    accomplish their tasks in a more transparent, efficient, smart, and empowered way. This work aligned teams on a shared vision and propelled teams forward towards planning.

    • Effectively launched a new global supplier onboarding experience that resulted in a 78% reduction in TaT (turnaround time) and 131% increase in conversion rate from the legacy experience.

    • Nimbly alleviated roadblocks due to lack of resources by prioritizing opportunities and collaborating on short and long-term solutions.

    • Publicly recognized for design leadership and trusted by cross-functional collaborators from strategy and planning through to execution. Effectively bridged work between silos and removed process friction.

    • Gracefully lead change management during large team reorganization and shifts in strategy and approach.

    • Grew the experience design team by 23 new team members in two quarters.

Tactics

  • User testing: Understanding our users and their end-to-end experience.

  • Utilizing Design Systems & Proven Patterns: Building new ideas quickly and once we have established proven winners, we can reuse them and apply throughout different flows.

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Praise from my team

  • "Thanks for being an amazing partner! We wouldn’t be where we are today without your help and strong leadership!”

    David Zipp, Associate Director, Software Engineering

  • “Amber is an extraordinary Product Experience Design leader and I truly enjoyed working with her! People that can combine sharp design vision, a huge empathy for users, and deep UX understanding across a wide range of topics, and yet can still relate, care for, and inspire a large team are rare. I don't know if I've seen anyone combine these skills better than Amber. I feel both a sense of pride and a recognition that it was Amber's rare talents that drove our team to succeed. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with and learn from her. Any company would be really lucky to have Amber!”

    Ying Wang Product Design Leader

  • “Amber was an excellent and empathetic manager, who gave me the space to learn and grow as I navigated how to build and lead a design team as a new manager. She has a keen eye for the details of design and cares about ensuring the quality and consistency of design across the team. She partners well with cross-functional team members, communicating expectations for how to work with designers and establishing good rapport. She knows how to scale design through process and brings those ideas, as well as an openness to improvements, to any team that she's a part of.”

    Katherine Olvera, Product Design Lead

  • "Amber was a great XD partner during our collaborative time at Wayfair. She helped to drive the priority of a good user experience, while also improving the relationship between product, design, and engineering. She introduced a formal design review process to my (engineering) team, which helped us to ensure that what we were delivering matched what was provided in the mocks and that we were not shipping any poor user experiences to our customers."

    Brian Williams, Software Engineer Manager

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