Laura Escobar
Design Lead @ Reelgood
New journey unlocked
About
Laura is a Product Designer with over 10 years of experience shipping high-quality products with teams worldwide. She is currently a Design Lead @ Reelgood.
During her career, she has led the end-to-end process for +70 B2B, B2C, and internal products, helping cross-functional teams to exceed expectations by focusing on a clear strategy, effective communication, and leveraging storytelling to articulate the business impact of design in challenging and fast-paced environments.
Contact
Work Experience
• Established a distributed Product Design team from the ground up to work with US clients on web and mobile products in less than a year
• Led, coached, and developed 14 Junior to Senior Designers to build critical thinking, efficiency, and high-quality craftmanship
• Recruited, interviewed, and evaluated Junior to Senior Designers with a custom-made hiring framework designed for efficiency and transparency
• Built and directed a Product Design trainee program for entry-level candidates, graduating a total of 10 Junior Product Designers
• Increased design maturity at the company by mentoring designers on problem-solving skills, Product Thinking, and end-to-end iterative design process
• Directed strategy, execution, and design for 15 projects from end to end acting as the DRI
• Established the Design System practice as a core service to build Design Systems from scratch
• Collaborated closely with their product and engineering team to develop 5 different products that drive core operations
• Led product discovery on high-stakes projects to based on a strategic vision and tied to business goals
• Integrate complex workflows into streamlined systems of invoicing and statistics reports for coaches, scouts, executives, and internal staff
• Shaped the impact of design to influence product strategy, documentation, and cross-functional collaboration
• Optimized design processes to increase efficiency by 200%
• Redefined the role of a UX/UI Designer in the company by taking an end-to-end approach, from discovery facilitation to UX Strategy, and all the way to high-fidelity prototyping and documentation
• Accelerated the UX maturity of the team which allowed more specialized services
• Pioneered the practice of new processes like Design Systems and Design Sprints, creating a highly profitable discovery process for dozens of clients
• Mentored and championed the growth of other team members, which resulted to the creation of a training program
• Strengthen the collaboration between design, product, and development to optimize implementation time by up to 40%
• Exceeded expectations on multi-year project roadmaps to ship high-quality work at a fast pace
Freelancer at Educational Web Studio (Disimplify's Partner) until 2016
Education
Eight-week remote program for ambitious designers who want to hone their skills, increase their impact and grow as leaders.
Features
Writing
This is the story of how I learned to become a leader by watching Tony Stark grow as a character over more than ten years
Growing is all about making calculated bets that take you out of your comfort zone that lead to better outcomes... even if the process is uncomfortable
Music and Product Design are more alike than I ever thought would be possible
Speaking
Guest speaker to talk about Product Design on Looking Outward, an online short course for music students and recent alumni
The designer and developer workflow
Introduction to Atomic Design
Kicking-off projects, the Google way
Introduction to Design Systems