Design Leadership · Platform UX · Enterprise Software

I build capability.

Sometimes it's a platform that enables dozens of product teams. Sometimes it's a design operating model, a designer growing into a leader, or a student taking their first job in design. Across ~15 years in enterprise UX, the throughline is the same: I create the systems, environments, and opportunities that make other people successful.

Senior UX Design Manager, Anaplan Previously IBM 12 years teaching at SAIC Chicago
The Work

Four beliefs. Projects as evidence.

01

People first

The best products come from healthy teams.

02

Clarity over complexity

Reducing ambiguity creates better decisions.

03

Systems over heroics

Build capabilities that help many people succeed repeatedly.

04

Business impact matters

Great design improves both customer and organizational outcomes.

Flagship Case Study

Designing the Platform Behind Anaplan Applications

How a platform for packaging, deploying, and configuring enterprise applications turned a 14-month, expert-led onboarding into a self-serve path to value — and what I decided when it wasn't obvious.

50–60 → 8–12 weeks to value
$200.7M annual NNACV
30% of Q4 2025 NNACV
10 → 26 applications
Read the case study →
How I Think

Philosophies & leadership in practice

Leadership, management, product, and design philosophies — plus the operating models, culture, and cross-functional alignment work behind them.

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Teaching

Twelve years at SAIC

~24 courses, 300+ students: experiential learning, critique culture, and bridging the gap between school and industry.

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Side Project

Where's My Stuff

Proof I still make things end-to-end: a full-stack PWA I designed, scoped, and shipped for my extended family — with Claude as my engineering team.

It's a personal inventory tracker built around natural language and voice: say "my passport is in the bedroom drawer" and it's logged; ask the same way and it's found. Households share one inventory, boxes get QR labels, packing lists suggest travel items, and font scaling makes it usable for the older adults in the family — because they're the users I built it for.

Where's My Stuff home screen with natural language prompts like 'Where's my passport?'
Home: one input for everything — "log it, find it, update stock" — with prompts that teach by example.
Items list filtered by status and room, with stock quantities
Inventory: filterable by status and room, with stock counts inline.
Packing list screen for a trip, adding items from inventory
Packing lists: build a trip list straight from the household inventory, then share it.
Settings screen with text size controls and CSV export
Settings: text size first, not buried — designed for the older adults who actually use it. Data stays yours via CSV export.

I owned everything a product team would: user flows, information architecture, feature scoping, accessibility decisions, and a custom design system (plum and copper, Paul Rand-inspired geometric icons, floating card UI) that went through extensive exploration before landing. The code — React, Supabase, Vercel Edge Functions, the Claude API for language understanding — was written entirely by Claude, with me directing. Designing the product and directing the AI that builds it is, I suspect, what a lot of product work is about to become.

Try it live →

About

An engineer by training, a designer by practice, a teacher by choice

I started with a computer science engineering degree (Tec de Monterrey, with honors), then a Master of Design in Designed Objects from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — work I exhibited at Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan. That combination shapes how I lead: analytical enough to earn engineers' trust, craft-driven enough to hold a high design bar.

I spent nearly nine years at IBM leading UX for Planning Analytics and helping merge acquired products like SPSS and Cognos into cohesive experiences — in an organization where design quality was measured against the Six Universal Experiences, from Discover, Try, and Buy through Get Started to Support. Since 2021 I've been at Anaplan, where I'm part of the UX leadership team — leading one of the organization's three design pillars, with a focus on platform thinking, enterprise UX, and building teams that scale beyond their size, including post-acquisition integrations of Fluence and Syrup. Along the way: a filed patent and two publications. I've also taught at SAIC since 2014, because teaching makes me a better leader.

I'm Mexican-American — raised in Mexico, bilingual in Spanish and English — based in Chicago, and a parent of twins. Off hours you'll find me doing street photography or engineering elaborate living-room obstacle courses for my twins.

Her dedication and passion for design allows her to cross boundaries between disciplines, her talent creates integral solutions not only as a product designer, but also as a software developer, artist & scholar.

Carlos Ortega Morales · former IBM teammate — via LinkedIn
~15 years in UX MDes, SAIC BS Computer Science, with honors IBM 2012–2021 · Anaplan 2021–present 12+ years teaching at SAIC Managed 12 designers ~12 hiring loops as primary UX interviewer 1 filed patent · 2 publications Bilingual · ES/EN Chicago