Leading Product Design & Strategy @ BuildLabs (Ongoing)

Designing the expansion of a high-tech building company, working on everything from a tiny home configurator to a (large) highway billboard.

Role: Product Designer + Strategist | Timeline: 18+ months | Tools: Figma, Adobe, Basecamp, Box

Background

I was brought on to lead website and graphic design, but my role has expanded to include project management, brand strategy, systems design, and digital operations. I’m a core contributor across nearly every client-facing marketing and internal initiative. Here are a few:

Product Design + Development: ADU Configurator (in progress)

Leading end-to-end development of a "customize your tiny home" configurator, from cross-team project management to the logic architecture powering the experience itself. Designed the decision tree that drives real-time rendering — when a user selects a finish, material, or feature, the correct visual layers load accurately across all variables. Coordinating across development teams in Macedonia, India, and the U.S., and producing stakeholder-facing documentation to support decision-making and keep the project moving through constraints.

Brand Strategy: Mass Timber (in progress)

Narrowing the gap between BuildLabs' expertise in mass timber and how they are actually marketing it. Now supporting content strategy for a dedicated mass timber page and associated site, balancing ambition with team capacity to build a roadmap that's executable.

Project Management: Basecamp Project Tracking System

Pitched and built a structured project tracking framework in Basecamp to bring order to 110+ active and triaged projects. System supports full lifecycle visibility — from concept through completion — and formalized my role managing meeting minutes, stakeholder assignments, and deadlines across the team.

Operations + Systems Design: Pitch Deck Automation

Diagnosed a broken pitch deck workflow that required manual intervention, created version confusion, and put the CEO at risk of presenting expired links to prospective clients. Replaced it with a self-service Google Form solution: the CEO selects a deck, previews it, and a unique trackable link is generated and sent automatically — no intermediary required.

UX Design: "In Progress" Portfolio

Designed a live project-tracking section of the website featuring progress indicators and build photography, directly supporting the company's push for client-facing transparency. Backed it internally with a project mapper spreadsheet that gave the marketing team a single source of truth for project data — eliminating stakeholder dependency for routine stats.

UX Design: Redesigned Homepage

Overhauled the company's homepage to sharpen readability and drive engagement.

Art Direction: Highway Billboard & Jobsite Signage

Led brand direction discussions between marketing and company leadership for a highway billboard and 1,000 linear feet of fence signage near BuildLabs' new factory in Nash County, NC. Delivered final fence designs in two weeks. Also designed signs for active job sites in the Hamptons.

Editorial Design: Design + Detail Magazine

Designed two issues of BuildLabs' annual publication, distributed across the Hamptons as a brand awareness and relationship-building tool. Also designed 3+ digital handouts for marketing.

Brand Systems: Year-Round Digital Campaign

Designed and occasionally wrote taglines for 127 branded assets for a yearlong local theater marketing partnership, codifying BuildLabs' visual identity and building a reusable template system that significantly reduced future production time. Pitched and deployed a smart QR system to track the effectiveness of the campaign.