Team player,
Culture Champion,
Design Thinker

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Nice to meet you!
My name is Jenny Lanier.

I am passionate about creating environments and creating in environments where teams have the support and culture they need to be creative, take risks, and sustain focus to achieve measurable impacts on our users’ experiences.

My mission is to inspire my team to make cool stuff that solves real problems while helping them navigate challenges to become more mature and independent designers. I know I’ve been successful when they don’t need me anymore.

the gist

Leadership

I have held a variety of leadership positions that have helped me understand how to respond to and support the needs of different teams in different situations. Here are a few highlighted positions I’ve held, what I did, and what challenges I successfully navigated.

Cohort Coach

As a cohort coach for Patterns (IBM’s onboarding program) I coached early professional designers to more effectively communicate with their stakeholders, helped them resolve blockers to their projects, and helped them build stronger team dynamics. This leadership prepared them for a frictionless deployment onto their product teams.

Main challenge: Because this was the first post-college job for most of these individuals, my focus was to encourage against "imposter syndrome" and remind these designers of their capabilities and talents in an intimidating environment. I also helped them understand how to professionally and diplomatically resolve conflict within their teams.

Design Lead for Virtual Private Cloud

In addition to continuing work as an independent contributor, I spearheaded an enormous shift in how this squad operated in order to harness agile methodology. My efforts included more structured sprint cadences, such as sprint planning, sprint playbacks, and stand ups. As a result, our teams not only worked at a more sustainable pace, but had more time to contribute design led concepts to the product roadmap instead of only focusing on feature work. Our design team also earned a larger seat at the table in planning product strategy and evolution.

Main challenge: Installing sustainable processes that worked for our design team and our stakeholders. If a process only works for one party, it falls apart.

Senior Design Manager for Compute and Interconnectivity

I lead and shape the design strategy for a billion dollar portfolio of Cloud Enterprise software solutions. I manage a team of 11 designers who span 3 squads. Our 26-product portfolio includes Infrastructure as a Service offerings like Bare Metal & Virtual Servers, Virtual Private Cloud Networking, and Hybrid Networking via Transit Gateway, and Direct Link. During my tenure, I have sped up our onboarding process by 400% and have created processes that resulted in a 700% increase in design contributions to the product roadmap.

Main challenge: I learned how to maintain meaningful engagement with the largest design team and largest portfolio of products in Public Cloud at IBM.

Engagement

I prioritize investing in my professional community in an effort to learn from the experts around me, find opportunities for my talents or the talents of my team, and actively shape my organization’s culture.

Culture

Investing in my team’s culture is one of the most rewarding parts of my job. Even before I assumed the role of design manager for my team, I prioritized making our space a place where everyone can be their authentic selves. Pretending to be someone you’re not is both exhausting and incongruent with cultures that foster innovation.

Facilitation

Due to my abilities to frame complex problems, wrangle a variety of personalities, and focus on actionable outcomes, I am a sought after facilitator for design thinking workshops inside and outside of IBM. I’ve facilitated countless sessions to help teams align on their goals and determine plans to achieve them.

In partnership with InVision, I co-facilitated a master class for UX Fest to help people think through designing more accessible workshops.

Speaking engagements

I’ve attended design conferences across the world and have spoken at two (Big Design in Dallas, Texas and A11y Camp in Sydney, Australia) for my Tactile Wireframing work.

You can also hear my voice over talent for many of IBM Public Cloud’s internal and external marketing and demo videos. I also assist our motion team by coaching other voice over talent to help them deliver more engaging audio experiences.

General Assembly has greatly impacted the design community in Austin. I have moderated and participated in panels to share experiences to inspire and help others in pursuit of their own design careers.