Leadership

With more than 25 years of experience, Marty has held a variety of leadership roles within industry leading companies, including Capital One, Kforce and AT&T.

Empathy. It starts with “why?” Driving customer focused design starts with engaging customers beyond analytics and data. Qualitative research including customer interviews, ethnographic studies, usability tests are just some of the essential tools to help define opportunities. Journey mapping is a key exercise to understand what opportunities need to be solved and a great foundation to socialize user needs across the organization.

“Lifting up those around me is my passion. I empower designers to embrace their creative talent to make a difference in their work and their personal lives.”

Marty has built award winning customer focused design teams, at scale, that balance customer pains, business objectives, and innovative technologies. Marty’s engagement with creative peers and direct reports embraces the practices of leading from the front that influences new business, customer focused strategies, and hiring industry’s best minds.

Marty also embraces mentoring and advocating career growth by leading from behind. Impacted by amazing design leaders throughout Marty’s career, these experiences have propelled Marty’s career with fortune 50 and 100 companies.

Design Strategy

At Capital One, Marty is focused on innovating products and services that improves the lives of over 4.5 million customers by leading best in class UX research, developing fool proof design strategies, and executing iconic customer experiences.

  • Disrupting the auto loan industry by digitizing the auto lien process with digital transformation best practices.

  • Digital communications strategy increasing customer adoption of B2B platform >20%.

  • Innovating loan servicing products that transform the lives of over 4.5 million customers

Product Design

At AT&T, a Fortune 50 company, Marty led a team of user experience professionals in the creation and integration of a component based design system across multiple work streams of the B2B organization. This resulted in the reduction of development cycles from many months to a few weeks and cultivated brand consistency.

  • Managed a team of 12 UX professionals with a diverse set of skills; research, UX & interaction design, visual & motion design, content strategy, and front-end development.

  • 2010 - 2015 led the design integration of all Apple product launches.

Design Culture

At Kforce Marty provided consultative guidance and leadership of client projects requiring UX adoption and development including the managed engagement of 120 UX professionals across three regions. This resulted in Kforce doubling its user experience and digital design footprint in the design community from coast-to-coast.

  • Conducted human-centered design training to national partner groups.

  • Hosted a discussion panel “AI and the Workforce” with design leaders from Amazon, AT&T, and Sears.

Evangelizing Human-Centered Design

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford

To be iconic companies must integrate and execute human-centered design practices into business strategies, product roadmaps, operational processes, everywhere all the time. UX design is an expensive practice for companies to fund, however it is more expensive to fund products without customer knowledge, without customer input, without customer empathy. Discovery methods require thoughtful planning and strategy. UX designers harness the innate curiosity to dig deep into empathy session, synthesizing the customers pain points and defining the customer’s “jobs to be done”. This type of heavy lifting done early will result in iconic products and services.

This is a photo taken at a national conference where Marty is facilitating a design lab creating journey maps with customers.

Thought Leadership - Marty’s Publications

For companies seeking excellence, design thinking methodology offers synergy between business strategy and products. It finds innovative solutions to problems in a way that puts the customers’ needs first. While design thinking is often used at the product level, it can be applied to all levels of an organization. READ MORE

Today, the business landscape is transforming right before our eyes. Empowered to evaluate their customers’ needs, decision makers align their business strategy and their technical capabilities to their customers’ desires—crossing the threshold of a digital transformation. READ MORE

What an exciting time to be in this field! UI design has transformed how big brands interact with their customers. The acceptance of the design professional by organizations has manifested a new culture of developing products through user experience methodologies. READ MORE

"Leaders eat last..."

...and the willingness to place the needs of others above their own. A valuable lesson I learned as a mentee and a philosophy I practice today. Early in my career I learned to check my ego at the door. This simple act keeps the dialogue moving forward and gives collaboration a purpose.

Marty is a dynamic solutions architect and UX design leader with over two decades of experience creating successful brands, delivering intuitive and engaging user experiences, and building high-performance creative teams.

Marty has participated in CX projects for many Fortune 500 companies including Capital One, AT&T, Kforce, General Electric, IBM, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Marty is passionate about integrating design thinking into business strategies, innovating B2B and B2C solutions, building collaborative and efficient team environments at scale, and mentoring design practitioners. Additional career highlights include:

  • Human-Centered Design practitioner and Design Thinking facilitator.

  • Leading highly creative user experience teams.

  • Deploying UX practices and processes to streamline design and development across multiple product lines.

A wicked journey against a relentless current. Obstacles are conquered with persistence and optimism.

PHOTO: The Narrows at Zion National Park - 2015 

Photo by Madison Pappas

What colleagues and leadership say about Marty.

LEADS AND INSPIRES THOSE AROUND HIM

“Marty has polished a wide array of UX skills - from his mastery of the basics, (like tools, and approaches) to his ability to easily articulate a design problem/solution for a cross-disciplined team. He has a done some great thinking for me in the modular design space, and his work exemplifies "build once - use often" thinking.” On top of all this, he can lead and inspire those under him. I've relied on his keen insights regarding product design, and technology constraints.”

— Andrea S. VP Design Technology

LEAD AND THEY WILL FOLLOW

“Marty is an amazing leader. He truly cares about his staff in a way that is very rare these days in business. He is of the "lead and they will follow" clan. He will inspire you to want to exceed his expectations, and he genuinely appreciates your efforts when you do. In addition, his sense of humor and happy spirit make you want to come to work every day. Doesn't everyone want that in a boss?”

— Windy J. UX Senior Lead Strategist

VOICE OF REASON

“I worked with Marty on two major, very challenging projects. Marty fulfilled his role with humor, grace, tenacity, and a desire to get things right. He constantly advocated on behalf of the user experience, and stood up for principles of good design, in the face of hurried deadlines and often nebulous requirements. His was, and is, the voice of reason–he never sacrificed tact and humor, while still probing for answer and advocating clarity and consistency.”

— Bruce S. Technical Content Strategist