¡Hola! I'm Sylvia — Product Design & Direction.
Over 15+ years — leading product at a venture-backed climate fintech, scaling a design studio from 3 to 30, and partnering with global enterprises — I've helped teams translate ambiguity into direction, and direction into outcomes.
About
I simplify complexity — finding the clarity that unlocks progress across product design, strategy, systems thinking, and organizational alignment.
I work across startups and global enterprises, shaping product direction at inflection points — where clarity is the unlock. I'm drawn to the moments where ambiguity is highest and the stakes for getting it right are real: 0→1 products, platform transformations, organizations at a crossroads. Most recently, I led product at Context Nature, a venture-backed climate fintech, where I redesigned the core product to unlock an entirely new market.
At NTT, I designed the first graphical interface for their global threat intelligence platform — transforming raw telemetry into a system usable by both analysts and business leaders, driving 3x revenue growth in year one. At SocioFabrica, the design studio I co-founded, I led product work for Fortune 500 clients including a patented analytics UI later integrated into IBM's CX suite. At Hitachi Digital Services, a design system rollout I directed reduced drop-off by 30% and cut production time in half.
RISD trained, I began my career in brand at Wolff Olins and Interbrand — a foundation that continues to shape how I approach product. Clarity and craft are how strategy becomes real.
Featured Work
Principal Product Designer
Designed the initial conversational AI discovery experience for Hitachi Digital Services website.
Principal Product Designer
Making global cybersecurity intelligence understandable and actionable.
The challenge & insight
NTT processes a significant portion of the world's internet traffic — unmatched visibility into global cyber threats. But that intelligence only existed in formats specialists could read, invisible to the business leaders who needed it most.
This wasn't a visualization problem — it was a dual-audience problem. Analysts needed forensic depth; executives needed fast pattern recognition. Progressive disclosure became the structural solution: a single interface that could speak both languages without compromising either.
What I drove
Product definition, UX architecture, and data visualization strategy across a 2-year engagement. Key decisions: reframing the problem from "visualize data" to "make threat intelligence actionable across audiences"; designing the layered global threat map; and structuring navigation so non-technical users could move freely without losing specialist depth.
Key Outcomes
Head of Product & Design
Making underutilized climate tax credits viable for the accountants who control SMB access.
The challenge & insight
SMBs are central to large-scale decarbonization but consistently fail to access green tax incentives. Discovery revealed something structurally harder: SMBs don't control access — their accountants do. And for accountants, credits under $2M were unprofitable to process given liability exposure and percentage-based fees.
Solving for SMBs directly was the wrong lever. The unlock was solving for the intermediaries who control access. Dramatically reduce accountant effort — and give them the transparency and override control they require — and previously unworkable credits become viable, opening the entire SMB market.
What I drove
End-to-end: system reframing, customer discovery and validation, and human-centered AI design for a regulated financial product. Key decisions: reorienting around accountant workflows rather than SMB end-users; designing HITL AI that preserved professional accountability; and building reusable credit workflows with full traceability so accountants could verify, audit, and override at every step.
What this reinforced
In high-liability domains, efficiency only lands after trust is established. Intermediaries control access to end users across healthcare, finance, and legal — finding that lever changes where you intervene. Co-designing with accounting firms throughout compressed adoption because the people who needed to trust the system helped build it.
Key Outcomes
Senior Product Designer
Designed a patented analytics interface that democratized complex behavioral data — broadening the product's audience and ultimately leading to its acquisition and integration into IBM's CX Analytics suite.
Principal Product Designer
Spearheaded a global digital transformation that turned a fragmented, buyer-confusing website into a scalable system — aligning 18 stakeholders and creating the foundation for measurable growth.
The challenge & insight
Enterprise buyers were dropping off because the site didn't help them quickly connect Hitachi's AI solutions to their specific challenges. Behind that was a structural issue: no clear ownership, ad hoc publishing, weak analytics, and pressure to add personalization before the foundations existed.
We mapped the system and uncovered several compounding issues — inconsistent experiences, fragmented ownership, and gaps in measurement. Progress required aligning structure, data, and workflows around a single stake: customer decision clarity. That shared framing is what got previously fragmented teams moving together.
What I drove
I defined the transformation strategy and sequencing, facilitated alignment across 18 global stakeholders, and orchestrated a team of 6 and 4 agency partners. Three key decisions shaped the work: simplify before adding complexity (rebuilt IA and content model around how enterprise buyers actually search); build measurement before personalization (mapped journey tracking dependencies across stakeholders); and create systems teams could scale (design system, reusable templates, AI-assisted content workflows, and governance to prevent re-fragmentation).
Key Outcomes
Product Design & Strategy Lead
Helped a pre-launch clean-energy fintech establish positioning, close a seed round, and hand off a brand system that projected credibility before a track record existed.
The challenge & insight
CapeZero was entering a market dominated by spreadsheets, entrenched relationships, and big-bank incumbents. They had strong technology and a clear thesis, but hadn't yet answered the questions that determine whether early traction is accidental or repeatable: which customer segment to prioritize first, what differentiation would actually land with that segment, and how to communicate technical credibility without sounding like every other fintech.
In a trust-dependent, relationship-driven market, brand is not decoration — it's the first proof of competence. Getting the positioning wrong at launch doesn't just hurt marketing; it attracts the wrong customers, generates misleading signal, and is expensive to undo. The highest-leverage work here wasn't designing a website — it was making sure the strategy underneath it was sound before anything got built.
What I drove
Led the engagement end-to-end: research and segment prioritization, positioning and voice definition, pitch deck, brand identity, website, and a design system handed off internally. Three decisions drove the work: narrow segment focus before design; build the strategic narrative before any visual; and design the system to extend capacity without creating dependency.
What this reinforced
Early-stage product design often begins with narrative clarity — before a product can scale, teams need to align around the problem they're solving and how the product changes how work gets done. In conservative, trust-dependent markets, positioning and visual design aren't separate from the product; they're how credibility gets established before a track record exists.
Key Outcomes
Principal Product Designer
Led the creation of a unified interface system that streamlined the user experience across products and enabled faster, more consistent product development.
Principal Product Designer
Redesigned the brand and patient experience for a maternal health startup — grounding it in the emotional reality of new motherhood and turning that clarity into measurable growth.
The challenge & insight
Ruth Health had the right mission but the wrong entry point. Potential patients couldn't quickly understand what services were available, when they were relevant, or why Ruth Health was the right choice at one of the most vulnerable moments in their lives. The experience wasn't meeting people where they actually were.
In maternal healthcare, confusion doesn't just create drop-off — it creates doubt at exactly the moment patients most need to feel held. The design work wasn't primarily about simplifying navigation; it was about making women feel seen and guided from the first interaction. When the experience reflects the emotional reality of the person using it, trust forms faster — and trust is what converts in healthcare.
What I drove
I led discovery and storyboarding to map the patient journey and identify where Ruth Health could make a tangible difference. I then redesigned the experience around those moments: streamlining appointment booking, removing unnecessary friction from account creation, and building a component library that gave the team the agility to test new services without rebuilding from scratch. The visual and verbal language was crafted to feel warm and credible in equal measure.
Key Outcomes
Principal Product Designer
Designed a content and growth system for NTT's cybersecurity offering that doubled engagement and converted 5%+ of visitors into qualified leads.
The challenge & insight
NTT's threat intelligence platform had valuable, real-time data that no one outside the product was seeing. There was no mechanism to turn that intelligence into something a prospective buyer could encounter, understand, and act on.
The platform itself was the content. Short, sector-specific threat insights derived from live data — published rapidly via a custom CMS — could reach buyers before they ever entered a sales conversation. Intelligence became the acquisition channel.
What I drove
I designed the content layer and CMS architecture that enabled NTT's research team to publish threat insights rapidly, and connected that publishing system to the broader platform experience. This turned a closed tool into an ongoing lead-generation engine.
Key Outcomes
Creative & Experience Lead
Cracked the US market for a global luxury brand — identifying a cultural perception gap and closing it through three years of campaigns that consistently outperformed benchmarks.
The challenge & insight
Nespresso's global brand imagery — stylized product shots on dark backgrounds — worked as a luxury cue in Europe but felt cold and distant to US consumers. Campaigns were underperforming and the brand wasn't building the affinity needed to grow in a culturally distinct market.
The product wasn't the problem — the visual and emotional vocabulary was. US consumers needed to see themselves in the brand before they could aspire to it. Shifting to lifestyle imagery wasn't a dilution of the luxury positioning; it was the translation of it into a context where warmth and familiarity are themselves premium signals.
What I drove
At SocioFabrica, I led a team of six and art directed two photographers across a three-year partnership. We started with rapid lifestyle photoshoots in secondary US markets to test and validate the new direction before national rollout, then owned campaigns end-to-end — concept, art direction, photography, and omni-channel implementation across ecommerce, social, email, and in-store. The Alto launch applied the same logic to packaging and product storytelling, leading to a sellout at launch.
Key Outcomes
Creative & Experience Lead
Led experience strategy at Remezcla for MiPepsi, Pepsi's social platform for Latino audiences — bridging brand, content, and community in a way that resonated with millions; the partnership it sparked continued for over a decade.
What people say
Press & Recognition
