L.A. Times Cooking: Correcting the Workflow to Unlock a $2M+ Product Ecosystem
This project showcases my ability to step into complex product-engineering environments and course-correct underperforming workflows. As the Design Director, I pivoted the team from jumping to premature conclusions, realigning them around structured research, cohesive product visions, and engineering logic. Translating high-level business goals into systemic, component-driven CMS architectures. Building operational consensus across executives, stakeholders and x-functional teams, proving that exceptional, user-centric design is a direct multiplier for corporate revenue.
The Quick Look:
Inheriting the Los Angeles Times culinary re-platforming, I found a team trapped in an unguided execution loop—jumping straight to building flat templates based on internal assumptions rather than user data. I executed an immediate operational intervention, pausing the execution to lead a true, high-velocity Design Sprint. By establishing a rigorous research baseline, a clear product vision, and an enterprise design system, the corrected strategy directly drove a $2M+ revenue growth trajectory.
Role: Design Director & Experience Strategist
Domain: Mass Media / Digital Subscription Products / Design Operations
Scope: Executive Governance, Workflow Correction, Cross-Functional Leadership, Content Taxonomy, Cross-Vertical Component Systems, CMS Module Library, Data Migration
The Impact: Corrected a fragmented team culture, achieved +400% engagement, and expanded revenue by $2M+.
🔍 The Friction: Guessing User Needs & Designing in Silos
The Team Bottleneck: Rushing toward development deadlines, the product and engineering teams were building flat, text-heavy newspaper layouts unoptimized for active, hands-on cooking environments, completely bypassing user discovery.
The Business Bottleneck: The team was treating premium culinary archives as isolated, static articles. Because recipes lacked an integrated data structure, the business could not easily bundle content into collections or cross-promote high-intent utilities to readers browsing general news pages.
🧠 The Hands-On Leadership Intervention
I stepped in to redirect the team's velocity away from assumptions and into a systemic, data-backed design framework:
The Operational Course-Correction: Implemented a definitive Design Sprint methodology, transforming the team's mindset from guessing user requirements to tracking real-world home cook behaviors and engineering realities.
The Tagging Engine & Menu Collections: Led the creation of a robust metadata schema that automatically bundles isolated recipes into dynamic, multi-course Menu Collections—streamlining editorial production and meal-planning.
Cross-Vertical Promotion System: Architected a flexible Inline Promo Module built on the core design system. This component dynamically injects contextual recipe recommendations directly into the body wells of general news pages across latimes.com, capturing organic traffic loops.
The CMS Curated Module Library: Collaborated with tech leads to build a drag-and-drop ecosystem of pre-tokenized components inside the enterprise CMS, allowing editors to deploy complex features instantly without using engineering sprint cycles.
💡 The Solution Highlights
Contextual Media Scaling: Positioned flexible inline video and audio modules directly inside the step-by-step preparation flow, driving a 400% lift in video play completions.
The Single-Column Focus Well: Re-architected the layout to feature a clean, distraction-free reading experience with reduced lede image footprints and ample white space, optimized for messy kitchen environments.
Cross-Vertical UX Circularity: Eradicated internal content silos, allowing high-engagement lifestyle utilities to actively surface within hard news flows to maximize premium digital subscriptions.
