Orchestrating Possibility
I’m a product design leader who believes every product is a promise, every feature a fragment of someone’s daily story, and every team a constellation of potential waiting to be realized.
“Turtle is a fantastic designer, product leader, and teammate. Her work always elevates the original vision for an idea to an even higher level. And she has the organizational skills and persistence to turn ideas into tangible value for our customers.”
— Evan Schumacher, CEO, Switchcase Group, Inc.
My Aproach
Vision isn't just about seeing what's possible, but about recognizing the gaps between business goals and human needs that design can elegantly bridge. As a manager, I've learned that the most powerful visions aren't created in isolation—they emerge through collaborative exploration and careful listening.
When I transformed a two-year stalled project into a six-month success story at Driveway, it wasn't by imposing my own vision, but by refining our collective focus until we could see the essential path forward.
Cultivation is the art of nurturing growth—both in products and in people. I've found that designers flourish when given enough structure to feel secure and enough creative freedom to feel challenged. My role is to create fertile ground where techniques can be mastered, confidence can build, and innovation can take root. This means knowing when to offer guidance and when to step back, when to provide feedback and when to simply provide space.
Orchestration is about bringing diverse talents into harmony. Technical constraints, business objectives, and user needs often appear to be competing forces. My approach is to reveal their interconnection—showing how business sustainability enables better user experiences, how technical excellence creates business efficiency, and how user-centered thinking creates market differentiation. This orchestration extends beyond design teams to product management, engineering, and business stakeholders, creating alignment that moves beyond compromise to true innovation.
At the heart of my leadership approach is the belief that design management isn't merely about producing artifacts—it's about cultivating the conditions where meaningful experiences can emerge and where designers can do the best work of their careers.
"Turtle is extremely strong in communication across disciplines, and can handle any challenge. She can speak technically to developers as well as understand the challenges engineers face, while still considering what's best from a UX and product perspective. She is an incredible designer with tremendous attention to detail. I have seen her handle extreme product challenges with ease, and through it all has been a joy to work with."
— Karen Ford, Frontend Architect at Autodesk