Laura Escobar
🎉

Laura Escobar

Design Lead @ Reelgood

New journey unlocked

2 months ago

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

Substack
Bento
LinkedIn
Twitter
Dribbble

Work Experience

2020 — Now
United States

• 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

2019 — 2020
Lead Product Designer at Miami Heat
United States

• 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%

2018 — 2020

• 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

2017 — 2018
UX/UI Designer at Ideaworks International
2012 — 2017
UX/UI Designer at Disimplify
Sweden

Freelancer at Educational Web Studio (Disimplify's Partner) until 2016

Education

2021 — Now

Eight-week remote program for ambitious designers who want to hone their skills, increase their impact and grow as leaders.

2013 — 2016
Bachelor's Degree in Graphic Design at Universidad Don Bosco
El Salvador

Writing

2022

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

2022

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

2021

Music and Product Design are more alike than I ever thought would be possible

Speaking

2022

Guest speaker to talk about Product Design on Looking Outward, an online short course for music students and recent alumni

2020
2020
2019
Run, Project, Run! at GDG San Salvador

Kicking-off projects, the Google way

2019
Around the Design System in 80 slides at Dribbble Meetup

Introduction to Design Systems