Susan is Chief Experience Officer and a partner at Alley. She joined in 2014 to integrate a full suite of design services into Alley’s existing development practice. Today, Susan leads a strategy department of Product Managers, Agile Process Leaders, and Editorial Strategy professionals. In this capacity, she promotes expansion of Alley’s product strategy services and creates spaces for cross-team learning and professional development so that all teams are equipped to guide clients through each stage of a product’s lifecycle from discovery through design, development, launch, evaluation, and ongoing support.
On any given day, those in her department can be found analyzing user behavior with analytics, conducting qualitative user research, identifying the most valuable features for a product’s release, recommending improvements to the the publishing workflow in a CMS, removing blockers to a team’s productivity, or tracking a project’s budget and timeline health.
Susan has conducted user research, usability testing, and crafted information architecture for large scale, multi-faceted organizations such as KFF, The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, The Brookings Institution, Colorado Public Radio, and Bassmaster.
Susan holds a master’s degree in communications from Johns Hopkins University. She is based in Ottawa, Canada.