Hello, I’m Kara.
Please make yourself comfy in my digital home.
tl;dr
I help organizations solve complex operations and experience challenges with a strategic, human-centered, and highly communicative approach. With broad hands-on and practical experience across industries, including Finance and Healthcare, I align customer research with business strategy and facilitate cross-functional communication to achieve results. Unconventionally resourceful and self-motivated, I can offer a multi-disciplinary skillset from experience research, service design, coaching, conflict resolution, and financial operations/analysis. If you want the full 4-minute version, scroll on down.
Finance + Burnout
Professionally, my career started as a CPA in PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Business Recovery Services group, where I worked with clients like Kmart and US Air leading through their restructuring/bankruptcy. Once my team found out I could analyze numbers and connect with humans, I was often tasked with interviewing people and illuminating processes to identify strategic opportunities and manage business risk. Eventually, I transferred these skills to the startup space for a chance to build out the infrastructure and processes before it became a chaotic, broken organizational environment. What if… was a frequent question.
After eight family members and friends died in a short window of time, I was as bankrupt - physically, emotionally, and spiritually - as the companies I had been turning around. I leveraged my professional knack for coming into ambiguous, wicked situations, assessing what’s going on, and identifying what changes will turn things around. I hit the library. I hit the classroom. I made iterative experiments to my own health and lifestyle. I measured the results over and over until I got back to living a life spiked with passion and slathered with joy.
Health + Lifestyle Strategy Work
Others noticed the changes in me, which organically began a decade-long career as a health and lifestyle strategist for frazzled, Type-A professional women. In 2016, I created a podcast for women who don’t have time for BS or burnout. It’s called Le vital corps Salon. As salonnière, I interview successful working women – from artists to change agents to astronauts - about how they slay BS and sidestep burnout through a mix of personal and professional stories. Both spheres of this work deepened my ability to listen more empathetically, connect with people, and recognize the power of a well-formed, intuitive question. This also got me invited to host all kinds of conversations at conferences and events.
Shifting Gears
The functional health and lifestyle strategy work was intensely rewarding. I loved the challenge of being fully present with my clients and problem-solving with them. I loved redesigning the experience I offered based on what I learned about my clients. Yet, over time, it became increasingly socially isolating for me. Multiple relocations for my partner’s job became an inflection point. I craved more collaborative work with a cross-functional team. After a few months soul-searching, analyzing all the professional skills and tools I’ve collected over 20+ years, and talking to several trusted advisors, I made the leap.
Now: Service Design + Experience Strategy
This third act of my career in Service Design + Experience Strategy allows me to tackle juicy, cross-functional problems with a deeply human-centered approach. I'm happiest - and experienced:
Supporting stakeholders in the often uncomfortable problem space using multi-disciplinary methods from UX research, human-centered design, coaching, facilitation, conflict resolution as well as financial operations and analysis
Conducting research with the humans an organization serves to deeply understand their experience/mental models and replace assumptions with qualitative data - that holds up over years, not weeks or months
Aligning this qualitative data with the business strategy to identify opportunities that are both human-centered and financially sustainable
(Re)designing seamless, omnichannel experiences - both frontstage (CX) and backstage (EX)
Lubricating and implementing change in the messy, interstitial space between silos by leveraging communication
Operationalizing compliant UX Research Ops (most recently in healthcare) + Financial Ops (spanning 2 decades) starting from a team of one and often in highly, regulated industries
All of this challenges me to bring my whole self to work. That’s highly-motivating for me and beneficial for you.
If StrengthsFinder® 2.0 is your jam: Restorative - Strategic - Connectedness - Communication - Individualization
Outside of Work
Outside of work, I seek out and facilitate challenging conversations as a community mediator. Plus, you can find me hiking with my 2 rescue dogs, reading, playing board games, watching hockey (go, Bruins and Devils!), beekeeping, maintaining my genre-fluid, music nerd status on Spotify, and seeing live music.