The IBM Research organization's mission is to bring new technologies to the world, across Cloud, AI, and various other areas. The teams are typically composed of technical, scientific, and academic researchers. I was part of a new team to the org called the Emerging Technologies Experience team. Our purpose was to take tech that researchers were working on and help them to create an example of how it might be applied.
I worked closely with Caitlin on the Emerging Technology Experiences team at IBM, partnering on a series of projects. She was often the primary UX Designer on these projects, and we collaborated accordingly. Caitlin would often step up to the plate, taking on more than just the UX design work she was responsible for to learn research processes and then apply them so that we could propel projects forward faster.
I can confidently say that Caitlin is a fantastic UX Designer who thinks through complex problem spaces ranging from manufacturing and food safety use cases to chatbot development.
But what’s most amazing about Caitlin is not JUST her UX work - but the time she puts into impacting the team culture and community.
Our team was mostly remote - with teams in Austin, NYC, Spain, and Boston. As the team struggled to connect long-distance, Caitlin stepped up to lead efforts that would eventually change the fabric of how our team worked together. She organized weekly team calls for us to connect over ideas outside of work, building previously non-existent relationships. She also worked with members of the team to begin running retrospectives focused on team culture.
One of the major outcomes from Caitlin’s efforts was management beginning to build out new processes that would empower designers across the team to begin growing leadership skills during the course of our regular project work.
Caitlin is instrumental in advocating for a great user experience and design as a whole. She communicates the importance of design decisions with clarity to our developers and OMs. She is easy to work with and always willing to lend a helping hand. She is wonderful to collaborate with, always listening to ideas and in-turn bouncing ideas off of others.
She has taken the lead on many design efforts, further bettering our team from both a design and morale perspective. She has created and led design share-out meetings, ran retrospectives to assess team health, spearheaded the creation efforts of the IBM design language in Figma, bakes cakes on team members birthdays, and consistently makes her self available to give and receive critique on designs.
Caitlin is a leader, and I consider myself extremely lucky to work with her.