Kelsey most recently built and led a team at Cisco that focused on the Sales Lifecycle portfolio. Within her first year, she hired ~30 designers and researchers, from entry level to Director, and grew the team from 10 to 40. To do this, she organized hiring ops to make sure both the candidate and designer experience was great. She thought deeply about the best way to structure the teams to maximize both business effectiveness and designer success that would scale for years to come. Throughout her time at Cisco, Kelsey led both a Product Design team made up of designers delivering high quality solutions, as well as a Research & Strategy team that created and maintained team purpose, insights, enablement, and growth with a senior level team of craft specialists.

As a practitioner of everyday mindfulness, she strives to disseminate curious thinking and empathetic practices in her teams to create the best solutions and to build successful team dynamics. To scope her and her teams’ work, she centers on the problem to solve first and utilizes research insights, design thinking methodologies for collaboratively brainstorming, as well as inclusive and accessibility guidelines to have the balanced perspective needed to create delightful experiences. To manage her organizations, she focuses on the following five pillars to build impactful teams and assess success and growth:

Purpose People Practice Process Performance

Prior to Cisco, she led Blackboard’s User Experience and Design teams across the Teaching & Learning, Analytics, and Student Success portfolios, and specialized in user experience strategy and design process innovation while helping spearhead the IBM Design movement in 2012. Through building and utilizing her diverse and global teams, Kelsey worked to evangelize design thinking through agile methodologies, workshop facilitation, and improvement of internal processes while driving her teams to create transformative solutions for the educational community.

Kelsey's professional experience spans across IT, education, business analytics, e-commerce, client services, and financial industries. As a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with a degree in Graphic Design, she has a background in UX and Visual communication, and also holds certifications in Scaling Design Leadership, Enterprise Design Thinking and Scaled Agile Framework. 

Kelsey was born and raised in rural Tennessee, “found herself” in Austin, Texas, but now claims Nashville TN as home with her husband, two daughters, and two fur babies. She believes work/life balance is super important to keep the mind fresh, and also vital in connecting with humans in other ways. When Kelsey is not designing, she’s usually lifting heavy weights with her girlfriends, experimenting in the kitchen while face-timing her sister, or strategizing a board game move with her friends. As a side hustle, she owns several properties around Austin and Nashville where she stays in a constant state of projects and maintenance.