Product designer in Toronto
I design checkouts, onboarding and the systems behind them. Eleven years across startups and banks, most of it in fintech.
Rebuilt checkout and cut abandoned carts by a third.
Led onboarding for new accounts on web and mobile.
Started the component library the company still uses.
Marketing sites, icons and a lot of slides.
I hired Nora to fix a checkout our customers had complained about for years. She spent her first month listening in on support before she opened a design file, and the redesign she shipped is why those calls slowed down. She tells you what she found even when it is not what you hoped to hear. Any product team would be lucky to have her.
Nora is the designer engineers ask for by name. Her files answer the questions I would have asked, the edge cases are drawn out, and when something is hard to build she wants to know why instead of telling me to make it work. We shipped faster together than either of us would have alone.
I have worked with a lot of designers, and Nora is who I would pick for the messy projects. She stays calm when the plan changes, keeps the customer in every conversation, and writes the clearest release notes on the team. Also the best person to sit next to at an offsite.
Our support team loves Nora. She asked to shadow our calls, took notes on everything, and came back two weeks later with fixes for the things customers call about most. Billing tickets dropped right after. She treats support as part of design, which is rare.
I managed Nora for three years. She grew from the quiet designer in critique to the person the team goes to first when a problem has no clear owner.
She has great taste, but what sets her apart is judgment. She knows when a detail matters and when it can wait, and she can explain the difference to anyone in the company. When we rebuilt onboarding, she was the one who noticed that half our new customers were skipping the setup checklist entirely. Instead of redesigning the checklist, she sat with sales for two weeks, listened to what people were actually asking for on their first day, and rebuilt the first screen around that. Activation went up and the support queue for new accounts got noticeably shorter.
She is also a generous teammate. She runs the best critiques I have ever been part of, she writes things down so nobody has to ask twice, and she makes the people around her better without making a show of it. Two of the designers she mentored now lead teams of their own.
If you get the chance to work with Nora, take it. She has my highest recommendation.
Nora sat in on more research sessions than anyone outside my team. She listens, asks good follow up questions, and lets what she hears change her mind. With her on a project, our findings made it into the product instead of a slide deck.
Short version, hire Nora. Longer version, she joined a team of six engineers with no designer, earned everyone's trust in about a month, and left us a component library we still use every day.
Before Nora, design happened in whoever's pull request got there first. She sat in our standups, learned how our release process worked, and started handing us files that answered questions before we asked them. When something she designed turned out to be expensive to build, she wanted to hear it early and was happy to find a simpler way. She is also very funny, which helps on release nights.
Nora joined us for six months before our launch and ended up shaping most of the product.
We were four people with a prototype, a waitlist and a lot of opinions. Nora spent her first week talking to the people on that waitlist, and came back with a list of what they were actually trying to get done. It was shorter than our roadmap. She pushed us to cut features we were attached to, and she was right every time. The version we launched did three things well instead of ten things badly, and our first customers told us so.
What I did not expect was how much she would change the way we worked. She set up a weekly review where anyone could bring something half finished, and it became the most useful hour of our week. She wrote down every decision and the reason behind it, so when we hired our first engineers they could read why things were the way they were instead of asking. She was patient with me when I wanted to redesign everything the night before a demo, and honest with me when the idea was bad.
When her contract ended we tried very hard to keep her. She had already promised her time to another team, and she kept that promise, which told me everything about her. I have recommended her to three other founders since, and every one of them has thanked me.
Nora was my first mentor when I switched careers into UX. She found time every week, shared her messy early work so I could see how she really thinks, and never made me feel behind. Much of how I work today came from her.
Nora always asked for the data before the meeting. She would come to me with a question first, then design around what we found. Our dashboards got simpler, and people actually started opening them.
Nora designed our launch pages to feel like the app itself. She is fast, patient with a room full of opinions, and quick to share credit. I miss working with her.
I was an intern when I met Nora, and she treated me like a full member of the team from day one. She walked me through her design decisions, asked for my opinion, and actually used it. She is the kind of person you remember years later.
