Customer experience & product research leader · Detroit
I build the mechanisms that turn what customers need into what organizations do — pre-launch research programs, risk-prioritization methods, onboarding journeys, and the cross-functional forums that make them stick.
01 — About
I trained as an architect — which is to say I learned to design for how people actually live, then defend those choices in front of engineers, budgets, and building codes. An MBA and five years inside Daimler Trucks' engineering organization taught me how large companies make product decisions, and how far from the customer those decisions can drift.
At General Motors I've spent the EV transition closing that distance. First by leading onboarding for customers adopting new mental models — electric vehicles, home and public charging, driver assistance, autonomy. Then by building a program that put launch vehicles in people's hands for weeks at a time, so experience problems surfaced before customers found them, and a method that made those problems count in the quality system alongside technical defects. Today I lead a CX research team shaping how product, design, and quality leadership measure the customer experience.
In between, I founded a transformation-design practice, taught design thinking and human factors for eight years at three universities, earned the CCXP, and kept the habit of living the experiences I study — most recently by putting a vehicle-to-home charging system in my own garage.
CX isn't just a metric. It's a memory. The way our product makes someone feel — that's what they remember.
02 — Selected work
Four pieces of work from General Motors' EV transition that show the pattern. Details are kept at the level I can share publicly.
Validation tells you whether a vehicle works as specified. It says much less about what it's like to live with — the feature that surprises you in your own garage, the term that means two different things, the setting a first-time EV driver never knew to change.
Designed and launched the Customer Experience Fleet: a pre-launch program in which employees live with a launch vehicle as their own for four to eight weeks. Diary studies, structured debriefs, surveys, and vehicle data, synthesized continuously with Quality, Product, Human Factors, Brand, and Marketing so findings landed while they could still change something.
Across seven launches the program surfaced hundreds of dissatisfiers, most invisible to standard testing. Findings changed how vehicles are configured at dealership delivery, renamed an ambiguous in-vehicle feature in plain language, created a day-one onboarding series, and wrote new use cases into the next model's requirements.
When the Chevrolet Blazer EV launched in late 2023, the problems that halted its sale were experience failures — screens going dark, fast-charging sessions that quit — rather than mechanical ones. The pre-launch fleet had forecast the likely drivers of that stop-sale before launch. It remains the clearest public illustration of why customer-experience risk has to carry weight inside the quality system, which is the subject of the next case.
Quality systems rank issues by technical severity. An experience that frustrates thousands of customers but "works as designed" could be closed without anyone acting on it.
Created the CX Risk Prioritization Number — a score that combines how often an issue occurs, how customers feel about it, and how much it matters to them — and integrated it into the quality organization's global issue-management system across every program, so customer impact is weighed in the same view as technical severity.
"Working as designed" is no longer a final disposition. Experience issues compete for pre-launch fixes on equal footing, and leaders see customer risk next to everything else they already track.
Electric vehicles, charging, driver assistance, and autonomy ask customers to unlearn how a car works. The help people needed on day one often wasn't reaching them until day seven — if at all.
Led onboarding journey design across the center of learning, customer support, dealerships, and direct channels; aligned enterprise stakeholders on customer needs and product strategy; built and led a team of six Journey Managers.
Short-term supports in market while longer-term product changes landed, a team that earned high marks in leadership feedback, and a working model for how a company helps people adopt technology it is still inventing.
Cadillac's 2022 Lyriq launch — GM's first Ultium Cadillac — included an early-owner program that asked the first customers to share their ownership experience directly with the company, from delivery and range to charging time and the app, so the go-to-market approach could change while there was still time. It also became a public lesson in how such programs are framed: a confidentiality clause drew questions from regulators, and GM wrote to every participant to make explicit that safety concerns can always be reported.
Finding a problem is the easy part. Between discovery and a permanent fix, customers are living with it — and the functions that could help rarely sit in the same room.
Established an executive forum that brings Quality, Product, CX, Marketing, Engineering, and Program Management together around launch readiness and open customer issues, and designed a white-glove support model for the gap before the permanent solution ships. Built the dashboards — NPS, CSAT, adoption, case reduction — so the forum runs on evidence rather than escalation.
A forum that still convenes the right people around customer issues, and a standard I hold to: when a problem cannot yet be solved, customers should still feel supported, informed, and valued.
03 — In the room
Talks, workshops, and the occasional object — the parts of the job that don't fit in a case study.
General Motors · 2025
An address to the entire company, webcast to every GM employee, on why customer experience can't live in one team. In her words: “It's not a slogan. It's a behavior.”
In the room — her name on the screens, the whole company on the stream
Talk · November 2019
Why performance needs differ for every user and every product — mass reduction, personalization, energy absorption, fluid management — and what that means for designing with additive manufacturing.
Needs are different for each user and product
BLD PNW 2019 · Portland · WERK_ with The Joinery
For the Pacific Northwest B Corp leadership summit, WERK_ and The Joinery built a networking tool you could walk up to: a wooden wheel with every B Corp as a tag around the rim and every partnership as a thread. Katie presented Building a Partnership Strategy beside it while the attendees strung the map themselves.
Presenting Building a Partnership Strategy, the wheel filling in behind her
SPE Product Design & Development Division · Portland · October 2018
A Discover–Define–Develop workshop on design for additive manufacturing, with Carbon, HP, Formlabs, and Plural AM in the room and challenge briefs prepared by WERK_. Proceeds bought 3D printers for local schools.
Identify potential technologies: look at your attributes, ask your industry mentors, document the combinations
Client work · HP 3D Printing · Portland · 2018
A WERK_ workshop for HP's 3D printing business on how new manufacturing technology actually gets adopted: business-model canvases, concept sketches, and a room full of engineers arguing productively.
Working the room
Daimler Trucks North America · Portland · 2016–17
The innovation years at Daimler Trucks: Engineers in the Plant, the SPIN incubator, a chief-of-staff seat in Chassis Engineering — and a banner that said where everyone was headed.
Pointing the way
04 — Speaking & writing
On human-centered technology adoption, customer journeys in a digital transformation, and the research practices that keep organizations honest about what customers actually experience.
Closing keynote · Boston · October 2026
9th Global Digital Transformation & Customer Experience Summit, Conferenzia World.
05 — Teaching
Across three universities, because explaining a method to a sophomore is the fastest way to find out whether you actually understand it.
IDD 32623
Lawrence Technological University · Adjunct Professor · 2020–2022
Students find a focus area through research, analyze the people they are designing for, and develop products that are functional and inclusive — concept work through sketching, hands-on and digital rendering, 3D drawing, and animation.
IDD 3713
Lawrence Technological University · Adjunct Professor · 2020–2022
A lecture course in physical and cognitive ergonomics: observing how people actually behave and what they can do, then turning that into the specifications a designed environment has to meet.
UNST 222
Portland State University · Adjunct Faculty · 2014–2021
The sophomore course Katie developed and taught for the Design Thinking, Innovation & Entrepreneurship cluster: identify a real need, brainstorm, prototype, take feedback, iterate, and build a business model that lasts. Created with an interdisciplinary group of professors as a pillar of the cluster, whose curriculum she coordinated in 2016–17.
HfWU · Autumn 2018
Nürtingen-Geislingen University · Visiting Professor · 2018
A one-semester visiting appointment in Germany, teaching how organizations manage the innovation process.
06 — Education & certifications
The degrees and credentials behind the work, including the licenses from the building years.
07 — Tools
Canvases, worksheets and session guides from WERK_ workshops, B Corp summits and university classrooms — written down so you can run them without me. Download, adapt, pass them on.
A partnership-mapping method that began as a wooden wheel and a ball of yarn. On paper: list the organizations in your ecosystem by industry, mark who you've worked with and who you'd like to, and pick the five conversations you'll have today.
PDF · workbook and worksheet
One page, three questions — what worked and why, what could be better, how do I grow — and four directions to grow in: untapped industries, new products and services, market expansion, and knowledge transfer.
PDF · one-page canvas
A ninety-minute session for teams adopting a technology that breaks their old rules. Three moves: unlearn the design rules living in your gut, abstract the problem until novel solutions appear, then match the technology to the job.
PDF · facilitator guide
Discover, Define, Develop applied to design for additive manufacturing: a challenge poster per team, a technology-matching step, and a critique format that takes working designers from a brief to a printable concept.
PDF · brief and challenge posters
The format behind the client workshops and the 2019 lecture of the same name: step back from the technology, understand the people who will live with it, and design the adoption — not just the product — before the rollout.
PDF · agenda and canvases
The outline for UNST 222, the Design Thinking course I developed and taught for the cluster: identify needs, brainstorm solutions, incorporate feedback, iterate designs, and formulate a business model that lasts.
PDF · syllabus and assignment briefs
08 — Contact
I'm interested in roles and conversations at the intersection of customer experience, product research, and new technology — and in helping teams build the culture that makes those stick.
Resume available on request.