Lise LaTorre
UX Foundations Leadership
Design Systems, Accessibility, UX Quality
UX Leadership
For over 2 decades, I have been pursuing modular, conformant, semantic, and accessible approaches to the user experience. Roughly 10 years ago, I began embracing leadership - creating strategy, establishing roadmaps, scaling system impact, and improving design and engineering process while providing career guidance and support to the designers and engineers helping me make it happen.
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My Leadership Principles
Earn trust through actions
Successful leadership begins with relationships built on trust, to build a strategy against challenges with transparency, empathy and actions.
Bring a passion for craft
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With constant curiosity and a customer-first mindset we can drive innovation and quality product experiences.
Think big and small
Align the team's strategic vision to company and partner goals through realistic tactics and clear, concise communication.
Trust
Users: inclusive, accessible, cohesive, experience in which users can bring what they've learned in one area of the product to parse others, reducing cognitive load. Develop UX that makes the product easy to use, whether it be on desktop, mobile, or screenreader.
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Team: Authenticity, empathy, inclusion, supporting folks in finding a leadership voice that is true to who they are as unique individuals while also setting aside business lingo to link their values and goals to business impact
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Company: Link system and accessibility teams' goals and output to business value, clear, authentic communication, enablement offerings that make using the system and meeting accessibility goals the preferred solution. Predictable roadmap and processes that users can count on.
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Make it easy to use: Apply friction strategically to promote intentional deviation from norms. Remove friction where it interferes with a great user experience.
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Building Trust
Earn Trust
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with users by creating an inclusive, easy-to-use experience across web, mobile, and assistive technology
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with team members with inclusive, authentic, and clear feedback loops
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with our internal users (product teams) by maintaining quality, clarity, accountability while delivering meaningful assets and support
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Grow Craft Leaders by developing their unique leadership voices, and linking business needs to individual values and goals
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Scale Craft Expertise by providing a buffet of system and A11y resources that teams can access when and how they need them
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Users
Describe your service here. What makes it great? Use short catchy text to tell people what you offer, and the benefits they will receive. A great description gets readers in the mood, and makes them more likely to go ahead and book.
2
Team
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3
Company-wide
Describe your service here. What makes it great? Use short catchy text to tell people what you offer, and the benefits they will receive. A great description gets readers in the mood, and makes them more likely to go ahead and book.
Career Progression
In the 2000’s, I launched and ran InMotionMedia, bringing non-profit organizations and socially-minded companies online.
During this time, I wore many hats:
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Project manager
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Information architect
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Accessibility expert
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Technical trainer
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Full stack engineer
This is also when I made my first design system with a snippet library in Homesite that I used for teaching adminis to update their shiny new websites themselves.
After several years running IMM, I returned to working for others in various Lead UX Engineer roles for companies such as Wells Fargo, Sephora, Limos.com, and Castlight Health. My focus remained on creating modular, scalable, and accessible code, and teaching other engineers to do the same.
As Principal UX Engineer at Castlight Health, I built my first official design system and transitioned into Design System Engineering, eventually landing as a Lead Engineer on Salesforce Lightning Design System Team
During my time at Salesforce, I succumbed to pressure to move back into Leadership as Director of Design System Enablement and became fascinated by road mapping, establishing process, and other forms of strategizing the success of horizontal teams, as well as supporting individual designers and engineers in developing a leadership presence that feels authentic to them.
As Head of Design Systems at Gusto, I became a manager of managers and took on Product Design as well as Engineering. Without Product representation on the team, I was also responsible for vision, strategy, resource management, and advocacy.
I am now Sr Director of UI Foundations at Sprout Social, overseeing UX foundations, scaling accessible, performant, high quality design with Design Systems and UX Integrity teams, collaborating and mentoring partners in Product and Engineering.
Career Progression
June 2025 - April 2026
July 2024 - May 2025
January 2023 - June 2024
This is a Job Description. Briefly describe your specific position, including details about important achievements and milestones. Make sure to include relevant skills and highlights, and don't forget to adjust the timeframe in the subtitle.
This is a Job Description. Briefly describe your specific position, including details about important achievements and milestones. Make sure to include relevant skills and highlights, and don't forget to adjust the timeframe in the subtitle.
This is a Job Description. Briefly describe your specific position, including details about important achievements and milestones. Make sure to include relevant skills and highlights, and don't forget to adjust the timeframe in the subtitle.
Career Path
Web Developer
I started my career building websites with hand coded HTML, JavaScript, and later, CSS for boutique web studios, Hotwire, Wells Fargo and Barclay's Global Investors (now Blackrock). ​
Founder
In the 2000’s, I launched and ran InMotionMedia, bringing non-profit organizations and socially-minded companies online.
During this time, I wore many hats:
-
Project manager
-
Information architect
-
Accessibility expert
-
Technical trainer
-
Full stack engineer
This is also when I made my first design system with a snippet library in Homesite that I used for teaching adminis to update their shiny new websites themselves.
UX Engineer
After several years running IMM, I returned to working for others in various Lead UX Engineer roles for companies such as Wells Fargo, Sephora, Limos.com, and Castlight Health. My focus remained on creating modular, scalable, and accessible code, and teaching other engineers to do the same.
Design System Engineer
As Principal UX Engineer at Castlight Health, I built my first official design system and transitioned into Design System Engineering, eventually landing as a Lead Engineer on Salesforce Lightning Design System Team.
UX Foundations Leadership
During my time at Salesforce, I succumbed to pressure to move back into Leadership as Director of Design System Enablement and became fascinated by road mapping, establishing process, and other forms of strategizing the success of horizontal teams, as well as supporting individual designers and engineers in developing a leadership presence that feels authentic to them.
As Head of Design Systems at Gusto, I became a manager of managers and took on Product Design as well as Engineering. Without a Product Manager on the team, I was also responsible for vision, strategy, roadmapping, resource management, and advocacy.
Most recently, I was Sr Director of Product Design, UI Foundations at Sprout Social, scaling accessible, performant, high quality design with Design Systems and UX Integrity teams, managand collaborating and mentoring partners in Product and Engineering.​​​​​
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