In 2016, General Electric was in the middle of one of the most ambitious digital transformation efforts in corporate history — repositioning as an industrial software company on the back of its Predix IIoT platform. I joined to lead UX across GE Digital and GE Aviation, covering platforms built for industrial internet of things operations and aviation maintenance, repair, and overhaul environments.
The work touched some of the most demanding users in any industry: aircraft mechanics, MRO operations coordinators, floor supervisors, and industrial operators whose jobs involved real safety consequences and zero margin for bad software experiences.
GE's enterprise software had been built for the office — desktop-first, designed by people who had never stood inside an MRO hangar or watched an operations coordinator manage a shift on a factory floor. The result was software that technically worked but wasn't designed for the reality of how it was actually used.
The challenge wasn't just to redesign screens. It was to build the organizational capability, the research infrastructure, and the team culture that would make mobile-first enterprise design a core GE competency — not a one-off project.
I built the research program before anything else. My team conducted global contextual research — on-site interviews, job shadows, and usability studies with workers in MRO facilities across multiple countries. We watched people do their jobs. We built empathy maps before we built wireframes. We designed for the hangar, not the conference room.
From that foundation, I established GE's Mobile Center of Excellence — a dedicated organizational capability for mobile-first enterprise product design that hadn't existed before. This meant defining standards, building workflows, recruiting the right talent, and making the case internally for why mobile wasn't a nice-to-have but a strategic necessity.
I led UX for GE's first enterprise iOS application, which became the anchor deliverable of the GE–Apple partnership and set the design standard for mobile IIoT product development across the company. This wasn't a skunkworks project — it was the flagship.
Throughout all of this, I was coaching and managing a team of 11 UX professionals: building individual development plans, advocating for their work at the executive level, and creating a culture where doing deep user research was considered a competitive advantage, not a delay to delivery.
"I start with the user in their actual context. I build the infrastructure for good work before I ask for good work. And I believe that a manager's most important job is to make the case for design quality to the people who set the constraints."
GE's mobile enterprise product line shipped. The IIoT platform reached industrial customers at scale. The design standards my team established shaped the company's approach to mobile product development for years beyond my tenure.
The Mobile Center of Excellence I founded became the organizational home for mobile UX across GE's digital businesses. And the GE–Apple partnership — which the iOS app helped anchor — represented one of the most high-profile enterprise technology relationships of the era.
The team I built stayed. No attrition during my tenure. That metric matters as much to me as any product outcome.