Author: Mary
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Building Resilient, Motivated, and High-Performing Design Teams
Over the past few years, I’ve led teams through significant organisational change, including moments of rapid transition and uncertainty. Those experiences sharpened my perspective on leadership: sustaining motivation and morale matters just as much as craft excellence. This case study captures the strategies and principles I applied to strengthen a design team during a period…
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Part 1: Simplifying Account Management Complexity
When I stepped into this space, the team was navigating one of its most challenging transitions, a period marked by shifting priorities, low clarity on direction and a junior PM and Designer that were overwhelmed by the ask. I helped put structure in place to clarify strategy, drive alignment, and ensure the work delivered meaningful…
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Part 2: Delivering Account Management Outcomes
Introduction Building on the foundation established in Part 1: Simplifying Account Management Complexity, this next phase focused on translating strategic clarity into measurable, customer-facing improvements.Our Enterprise customers valued the flexibility of the account-management experience, but as adoption grew, so did complexity. Admins needed greater control, clearer hierarchy, and more efficient tools. My goal as design…
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Building Alignment and Velocity: Redesigning SDLC
How I led a cross-functional initiative to align product, design, and engineering through a redesigned software development lifecycle.
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Proactive Design Leadership: Delivering the Learning Paths Initiative
My role as design lead was to create clarity to define a vision, align stakeholders, and lead a user-centred strategy that would allow the team to move quickly and confidently from uncertainty to launch.
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Improving the Course-Taking Experience for 30 Million Learners
Introduction The course-taking experience sits at the heart of Udemy’s product where millions of learners engage with content every day. But years of incremental updates and technical debt had made it complex, inconsistent, and hard to improve. Learners struggled to find essential tools, while engineering faced long delivery cycles for even simple changes. As the…
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UX leadership case study: UXtomorrow, connecting and inspiring the design community
UXtomorrow is a design community initiative that originated from a series of meetups organized by Mary O’Gorman and Marie Hedigan in Dublin. UXtomorrow aimed to create a platform for designers to connect and contribute to the local design community. This case study explores the evolution of UXtomorrow…
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Transforming product experience and team growth in media
This case study showcases my experience as a design leader in a demanding product environment. Joining a team with low morale, a lack of clear vision, and legacy product issues, I aimed to leverage my design and leadership skills to guide the product, foster collaboration, motivate the team, connect with users, and improve cross-departmental cooperation.