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"Sarah came to me a few months ago with an idea to bring our human-computer interaction backgrounds together in a way that allows us to talk about behavior, psychology, cognition, and more with a larger audience. As I write this, we've already conducted two sessions of our new conversations in behavioral design 'club' if you will and it's gone SO WELL! We've both shared the sentiment that our design team probably knows most of these teachings as common sense but it'd be incredible to help pair terminology and applied examples to design patterns, biases, and other psych tactics/principles worth exploring (and avoiding) when delivering great products. Working with Sarz is always a joy; I appreciate her pace, the way she thinks through approaches to activities and discussion in our planning sessions, and just getting the chance to riff off of each other in a product centered space. I really do appreciate that she validates my input when planning, she continues to communicate her gratitude to both myself and our audience on calls, and always creates the most comfortable environment when we're working together. She is an incredible communicator, both as a teammate and as a facilitator, and I feel grateful to bare witness to it all! "
"Sarah was incredible as Design Lead on UTD. Maintaining a calm and focused approach to challenges, and being able to quickly and smoothly explain design principles to clients are definitely some of her strengths. I learned a lot from her about how to interact with clients and how to break down vague/discovery work into documentable user stories and chunks. I never felt micromanaged and I appreciated her hands off approach. Sometimes—as a Dialexa newbie—I did feel a little too hands off at times, but any time I had questions or concerns Sarah was a beacon of knowledge and did a lot to help me back on track!"
"Sarah has a remarkable ability to discern our strengths and growth opportunities and empowered us to navigate unfamiliar territories. This was my first engagement in which I helped with research and setting up a Maze test. I was initially hesitant, but having the guidance, feedback, and examples from Sarah provided me with a strong foundation. At another time, when asking Sarz for her input on different masthead styles I had worked on, she encouraged me to confidently choose a direction and articulate the rationale behind my choice. This is just one example of how Sarz actively fosters the growth of her team members, instilling confidence in design decisions and encouraging articulating design rationale—a skill I aimed to improve on. "
"Sarah always made time to accommodate design tweaks, or questions that I or the engineering/qa team had regarding designs, and was quick to translate client feedback into artifacts that we could use to align with them over. This ability to proactively cook up designs, allowed us to cut through a lot of chatter and get client buy in much quicker than if we had to rely on conversation/diagrams alone. Sarah ran a really successful series of workshops to determine a product North Star that both helped orient a fairly disorganized client as well as impact product, design and engineering decisions for the remainder of the product. It was really cool to see the impact cascade through the org, as we would have stakeholders reference our ultimate goal of driving the practitioner through an error free application and the like. The point being, this kind of workshop was new to them, and improved the clients org for the better. She represents the gold standard of not just Design leadership, but also delivery leadership. She is organized, driven, collaborative and able to quickly gain credibility with her team. If I were able to choose a design lead for my future engagements, I would choose her every time."
"Without Sarah's leadership on the IBM / Allstate engagement, I'm not sure it would have been as successful as it was. Sarah was calm and collected even during moments when the ask of the client became unclear or when the engagement was ambiguous at the beginning, which allowed us to think creatively on how to move forward. Sarah was transparent and open when we had questions. Even when we may have had concerns, she always saw things in a positive light. During this engagement, Sarah was organized in tracking our progress and was great with communicating that progress with the client. The stakeholders easily built trust with our team because of this."