Valerie Downs
Speed to Value
Multidisciplinary designer with ~15 years of experience helping companies craft and scale their products.
About me
De-risk and build confidence
I'm a multidisciplinary designer with nearly 15 years of experience. I thrive working cross-departmentally to understand, test and ultimately build great products for our users and help our businesses succeed.
My process is highly collaborative, bringing in engineers, product managers and other key stakeholders early and often. I am thoughtful in the artifacts and methods I choose to create with my team, always focusing on what we can do to de-risk, build confidence or create a shared understanding.
I love to move quickly, often understanding the trade-offs of delivering pixel perfect designs in favor of rapid learning. I believe the right mix of craft and experimentation can be scrappy but not sloppy.
Previously at
Experience
Selected Experience
Staff Product Designer
Shaping the future of core data objects across the Optro platform. Delivering AI patterns: context attachment, reasoning states, and working Agent POCs, while advocating for new data models across product teams.
User Experience Architect
Shaped design strategy for app bundles, cross-sell, and upsell across +200 Atlassian marketplace apps. Delivered Growth and AI patterns at scale.
Contract Designer
0→1 product design for a platform that analyzes, optimizes, and secures third-party scripts, helping teams achieve PCI DSS, GDPR, SOX, and ISO/IEC 27001 compliance.
Senior Product Designer, Enterprise
Led design for Enterprise and Growth teams. Shipped RBAC, audit logs, and team management at scale. Increased account upgrades 36%, sign-ups 6.5%, and generated over $500K in sales-qualified leads.
Lead Product Designer
Led design for Corteva's emerging technologies portfolio, shipping a new suite of crop protection products built on cutting-edge computer vision, collaborating with data science to shape and train the underlying models, and mentoring junior designers.
Experience Architect, Industry X.0
Consulted for some of the world's largest brands across home energy automation, industrial IoT, and animal disease containment.
UX Designer
Worked across Enterprise and Growth teams on a financial reporting platform. Key projects included a full redesign of admin, roles, and permissions.