About Me

I recently ended a 13-year journey as Co-founder and Managing Partner of Gobee Group, LLC. Starting and running a small business allows you dive deeply into multiple roles (or hats). In my time with Gobee, I've had the opportunity to,

• Lead design and user research for digital and physical products. I lead from the front and would often work alongside my teams doing the work whether that be at a hospital or at a small rural clinic in Northern Nigeria.
• Manage products from conception to implementation. For me, design is actionable and active, good design research yield insights. Insights aren't insights unless they affect design choices in a positive way. I've worked on everything from developing mobile services for adult education and workforce training to the development of pneumonia screening device.
• Developed business opportunities and formed meaningful partnerships. One of my superpowers is making generative connections between organizations and people.
• Tell stories that are impactful and persuasive. It is not enough to do good work. I've always pushed the envelope in terms of using visualization, video, and clear writing to explain complex topics.

What's next?

I'm aiming to be a senior individual contributor working on complex problems and building amazing products.

Want to learn a little more about Gobee's journey?

My Co-founder, Jaspal Sandhu, wrote a heartfelt letter reflecting on the closing of Gobee and our impact on human-centered design and innovation for social impact. Here are a few my thoughts on Gobee:

A Bridge and a Go between

We worked hard at Gobee to be a bridge for under-appreciated and overlooked perspectives with material impact on the design of technology and technology-enabled products and services. We leveraged our deep technical expertise and rich understanding of the people, places, and methods to uncover critical insights that needed to be heard and incorporated into the technologies we rely on day in, day out.

End-to-End Design

Today, human-centered design is deeply embedded in corporate practice. Researchers work alongside designers and engineers in tightly connected teams. When we started Gobee, this was most decidedly not the case. Our approach to human-centered design didn't end at the insights. We challenged ourselves to develop approaches that answered the key questions at all levels of the design process. We pushed our team to open, collaborative, and constantly engaging with everyone from senior leadership to the frontline engineers to ensure the best possible outcome.

Remote-First

I'll admit that I find many of the discussions of remote-first work to be odd. Gobee started from day one as a remote-first workplace. We didn't have an office, we had a thinkspace. We gathered often in all sorts of fun places. Our final team retreat took us to the coast of California not far from Sea Ranch. I think I'll write a post specifically on how to make remote work a positive experience, but what I can say is that remote-first work helps tap underutilized talent.

Diverse and inclusive

We never described ourselves as minority-owned. In fact, we never even discussed describing ourselves in any way other than a design firm until after the tragic passing of George Floyd. But, in an industry that is overwhelmingly white and male, Gobee stood out for our seemingly never-ending supply of talented women and BiPOC designers. This wasn't intentional, but a byproduct of having a representative leadership team, and a strong culture of mentorship and inclusion.  

Intellectually Curious and Flexible

The answers to complex problems aren't easily found. Method must match the problem. But, often, there is a tendency to fit the methods we are comfortable with onto problems for which they aren't suited. Perhaps because of our roots at the intersection of academia and the corporate world, Gobee pushed the envelope of using a constellation of methods (qualitative and quantitative) to answer challenging questions. We were as comfortable using a quantitative model as we were doing bread and butter interviewing.

Respectful and Collaborative

Good design and innovation doesn't happen in a silo. It is often critical to be able to communicate with the C suite as effectively as you are able to engage with users. Moreover, products, policies, services, and all manner of the things we are designing are complex. Complexity requires collaboration among many disciplines to achieve results. At Gobee, we had amazing relationships with CEOs, engineers, UX designers, graphic designers, clinicians, government officials, and many others. Respecting the work and approaches of other disciplines and actively collaborating to achieve things that make an impact are an essentially element of an increasingly complex world. Gobee did that well.  

Storytelling

The Gobee team worked hard to distilling complex ideas into simple stories. From data visualizations to film, we used many methods to communicate our insights and spur action.