As VP of Brand & Design:
‣ Led 5 design teams for Austin's first unicorn startup
- ‣ Oversaw a comprehensive company rebrand
- ‣ Scaled product design by 2x and founded a User Research team
- ‣ Drove a new design system and design software stack/workflow
Company Rebrand
Summary
Note: Workrise later reverted to the original RigUp name in 2025 – this case study covers the original 2021 rebrand.
After an aggressive acquisition strategy, RigUp had 13 companies across 6 industrial sectors that needed to live under one brand.
Goals
We needed to position ourselves as the leader in skilled labor management across oil, gas, wind, solar, and commercial construction.
We had just six months to make this happen.
Some of this work was developed in partnership with the talented team at Los York.
Process
I hired a creative director to establish an in-house agency and led the large-scale rebrand from RigUp to Workrise, the newly chosen name.
Worker Management Tools
Summary
RigUp's contingent workforce management tools set it apart from all other skilled labor placement vendors. Before RigUp, contingent workers relied on paper forms, but RigUp revolutionized the industry by creating digital solutions to capture and store all worker information—an industry first.
This innovation played a key role in RigUp securing $300M in Series E funding at a $2.9B valuation.
Goals
Continue refining and enhancing existing products while simultaneously exploring and prototyping new ones.
Process
Research
When I was first hired, I made it a priority to establish a User Research team, starting with my first hire – a Principal UX Researcher. From there, she steadily built out the team.
A senior designer on one of the teams excelled at ensuring the team focused on solving the right problems, so I quickly promoted him to lead designer.
We discussed the methodologies he was using, and I challenged him to test, refine, and document a process that would both validate and accelerate design decisions.
This approach is explained exceptionally well in this write up.
Map from one of Chase’s Problem Framing Workshops
Process
Design
I implemented several key initiatives to improve our design process:
‣ Established a bi-weekly all-hands showcase and critique to foster collaboration and feedback.
‣ Introduced a weekly design-team-specific critique for deeper design discussions.
‣ Migrated the team to a new design software stack, improving efficiency and saving $48K annually.
‣ Centralized and expanded documentation to create a single source of truth.
‣ Oversaw the development of a comprehensive design system with full engineering support.
Results
Unfortunately, we didn’t prioritize split testing with quantified KPIs. Qualitatively, we were the first to offer a digital skilled labor management system, and the impact was overwhelmingly positive with customers.
Put simply—we helped put food on the table for skilled workers and their families. We got them paid weeks or even months faster than any other system. By reducing paperwork processing time by 14x, we gave workers more time with their families.