Company:

Yext

Innovating new products and influencing product strategy for a pioneering AI search company

Helping consumers find answers about their favorite brands

Yext is one of New York's largest local start-ups and a market leader in AI and NLP (natural language processing)-powered search experiences. I joined Yext in 2017, just after they went public, at a transformational moment for the company.

Yext's success at the time was centered around its location data services. These allowed large retail, healthcare and financial brands such as Sunglasses Hut, Denny's or Allstate to update data about their locations in the cloud and automatically push it out to hundreds of listing partners. Our clients could then provide their customers with accurate information however they chose to engage with the brand — via Google Maps, Facebook, Alexa, etc.

Given our access to this highly structured, authoritative data about a brand, we recognized an opportunity to expand from location-focused data to a general purpose knowledge graph. I led a design effort to rethink how the company could pivot our offering to include natural language and AI-powered search on a brand's site. Expanding the team's focus from enterprise-focused interfaces to include consumer search experiences was a particularly fun challenge, and an opportunity to fundamentally shift the company's focus.

During my time at Yext I provided strategic product vision and input to the CEO, CTO and CSO as part of our product council, established a design system strategy, and led a cross-functional design organization.

TITLE

Vice President of User Experience

SCOPE

Product Strategy, Product Design, User Research, Innovation with Partners

500%

Team Growth

SEGMENT

Consumers, B2B Clients, Developers

100m+

Users Reached

4

years (2017-2021)