Staff Product Designer at Paylocity · 10 years in design

I transform chaos into better products, systems, and teams.

TL;DR

I’m Bex, a staff designer. I find the real problem and surface it to the right people.

The artifacts I leave behind keep working after I’m gone: frameworks, system models, and research that teams are still building on a year later, steering decisions in rooms I’m not even in. It’s how I create clarity in complex, ambiguous work when no one can agree where to start.

Case studies

Company: PaylocityStrategySystems

Workflows & Automation

While I was brought in to design the future, our user feedback revealed more urgent priorities: fix the current experience ASAP. I ran multiple triad workshops, aligned three teams around a shared vision (prototype to the right), defined the future platform from scratch, and de-risked our first MVP, now in development — and that's just the beginning of the story.

View case study →

Company: AbleAIZero-to-one

Quiller

Grassroots organizations needed professional fundraising content but couldn't afford an agency. I co-designed and shipped an AI tool that fixed that, which we hand-trained on real fundraising emails back in 2022. Quiller's team raised $1.2M, won four awards, and was acquired in 2025.

View case study →

Company: PaylocityAIRedesign

Smart Fillable Forms

Paylocity had a hackathon-winning concept for AI-powered form creation. I turned it into an enterprise-ready product — making AI behavior transparent and trustworthy, reimagining the entire experience, and shipping the MVP and fast-follows.

View case study →

Org designCulture

Leadership & Culture

My impact doesn't stop with my own work. I co-led a listening tour that reached 99% of UX, built our first mentorship program, taught cross-functional teams, earned two top-three AI hackathon placements, and turned what I learned into graduate teaching, public writing, and a talk at UX Camps Chicago.

Coming soon

36% → 14%

Our team cut client retention risk in half due to a reprioritization workshop I led.

$1.0M

I co-designed and shipped an MVP for a company who raised a significant seed round of funding.

1/3

I led our organization's first mentorship program and over 1/3 of the organization signed up!

About me

Hi! I’m Bex. Professional why asker. AI-native designer. 0→1 builder.

I’m strongest where the path doesn’t exist yet, and someone needs to say the hard thing out loud.

When I’m not designing, I’m in my home art studio, outside dancing to live music, on a soccer field, or learning how to cook a new cuisine.

How I think

View all articles on Medium →

ResearchStrategyProduct Design

How a Few Usability Tests Changed Our Whole Product Roadmap

Three months before planning season, usability tests revealed critical frustrations we'd been missing — and shifted our entire roadmap from adoption features to fixing the platform's foundation. Featured on People Nerds ↗

LeadershipCultureDesign

Hospitality as a Lens for Leadership

Great leadership mirrors the principles of hospitality — designing conditions for people to flourish, anticipating needs, and leading with vulnerability rather than perfection.

StrategySystemsMVP

Defining a Scalable, Platform-Level MVP

I used a workshop-based approach to align stakeholders and define an MVP for a new task platform — prioritizing by user impact and implementation effort across a large enterprise.

LeadershipCareerProduct Design

The Designer's Visibility Playbook

Visibility isn't self-promotion — it's reliability and collaboration done consistently. Here are the strategies that have actually built my reputation and relationships over time.

10 years experience · platform strategy · AI products · zero to one builder · advisor, speaker, writer · co-designed an ai product acquired in 2025 · built paylocity’s first ux mentorship program · 10 years experience · platform strategy · AI products · zero to one builder · advisor, speaker, writer · co-designed an ai product acquired in 2025 · built paylocity’s first ux mentorship program ·