Sharon Orienza

I'm a Senior User Experience Strategist and Product Design Leader with a master's degree in HCI/UX research with extensive, practical experience as a full-stack UX Practitioner. For the past ten years, I've led — and worked alongside — teams across diverse, regulated industries such as Financial Services, Legal, Healthcare, Manufacturing, and Energy Management. My expertise spans organizations of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 200s, with a strong focus on R&D for enterprise platforms, IoT device monitoring, B2B and SaaS applications.

I specialize in crafting user-centric solutions that drive innovation and business impact.

UX Strategist, PM and Product Design Consulting - Orienza Designs LLC - Pittsburgh, PA

(2000-01)

Provide end-to-end UX research and product design services to small businesses, advertising agencies, design and consulting firms. Develop comprehensive scopes of work, proposals and product roadmaps that define business challenges and user needs through qualitative and quantitative research. Provide recommendations on AI tools to help them develop more efficient workflows and processes.

Sr. UX Manager of Product Design - Cardinal Health - Dublin, OH (Remote in Pittsburgh, PA)

(2022-08 - 2025-08)

Developed, managed and supported a fully remote UX Team of 8 fulltime employees and 4 contractors across 4 time zones throughout the United States. I worked alongside and led a product design team that was responsible for the complete overhaul and redesign of CH's Pharma B2B enterprise platform, Order Express. Under my direction, my team introduced methods and tools such as user task audits in FigJam, rapid/on-the-fly wireframing and prototyping in Figma — utilizing Ai and templates for efficiency — as well as usability testing and script writing based on task audits and user feedback.

• Led a distributed UX team of 12+ in the redesign of Cardinal Health's B2B pharma eCommerce platform, applying HCI Research and Design principles to identify clinicians and healthcare buyers ordering workflows and tasks within the system.
• Led end-to-end redesign of a transaction-heavy enterprise platform, including Ai-powered search on the Coveo platform as well as leading the development of a scalable commerce architecture.
• Established and documented UX DesignOps practices in Confluence and Microsoft Teams, embedding UX Research methods such as Heuristics, CASTLE/HEART/SUS metrics, and usability testing into sprint cycles and project planning within our Jira Kanplan boards.
• Led bi-weekly design system workshops to define component usage criteria, interaction standards, and governance guidelines, aligning team members on existing components — as well as adoption for introduction of new components to the system.
• Co-led prioritization with Stakeholders and Development for project planning of core platform features across pricing, fulfillment, and order management, balancing business needs with user pain points from pharmacies and health systems.
• Developed a UX Playbook & onboarding knowledgebase in Microsoft Teams to accelerate research/design ramp-up and cross-functional collaboration.

User Experience Manager - Vertiv - Columbus, OH (Remote in Pittsburgh, PA)

(2022-03 - 2022-08)

Brought on through the acquisition of Eaton products to lead UX research and product design strategy during their digital/product innovation and transformation efforts for their global enterprise tools. Led and worked alongside a fully remote, cross-regional team (US, Italy, Poland, Portugal and China), driving the adoption of UX best practices in user research and design for developing requirements for responsive and mobile applications in a technically complex, industrial B2B environment.

• Directed UX strategy and product planning for enterprise tools supporting global teams across US, Italy, and China.
• Facilitated 12+ design thinking workshops to align engineering, operations, and manufacturing with user needs.
• Doubled adoption of UX methods across live R&D projects in 90 days through stakeholder education and facilitated workshops; developing awareness for targeted process integration in an agile environment.
• Built a DesignOps system that identified high-value projects and pinpointed where UX research and design could deliver the most meaningful outcomes.

Lead UX Product Engineer (Contractor through Softworld) - SYNOPSYS via Softworld - Boston, MA (Remote in Pittsburgh, PA)

(2021-08 - 2022-03)

Accepted a short-term contract during the pandemic which was then extended to guide the team through a leadership transition after the UX Director's departure. Led three remote designers in redesigning a legacy enterprise desktop platform into a SaaS solution, partnering across multiple development teams and driving discovery research, workflow workshops, and iterative prototyping with SMEs.

• Led UX discovery and prototyping for a cybersecurity SaaS platform, stabilizing delivery during a leadership gap.
• Defined and elicited new features and requirements with SMEs, Stakeholders and Development Through diagram workshops, and iterative prototyping.
• Implemented Kanplan-based DesignOps in JIRA, enabling visibility and traceability of UX research and design work.

Principal Sr UX Product Engineer (Working Supervisor: Converted from BWS) - Eaton via BWS - Coraopolis, PA

(2019-05 - 2021-06)

Brought onboard when several BWS applications were purchased by Eaton. Reporting to the Director of R&D, I acted initially as a "Team of One" spearheading UX Strategy, Research and Design for Eaton's COE of Applications. SOW Plans created combined generative and evaluative research along with product design goals for SaaS-based monitoring applications.

Represented UX initiatives during Quarterly Leadership Project Planning meetings for scheduling and budgeting of projects and project managed work with Eaton's global teams.

• Began as a "Team of One" which I later developed into a small UX Team for Eaton's Center of Excellence in Applications.
• Led end-to-end research and design for both responsive IoT monitoring interfaces and mobile-native energy/EV charging apps, aligning R&D, Product, and Business teams.
• Conducted discovery research that reframed product hypotheses, saving $100K in my first 3 months.
• Collaborated closely with Business Stakeholders, Product Teams and Development Teams through all stages of development.
• Projects: Edison Metering Application, Lincoln Project for EV Chargers, Project Washington Plant Monitoring, BLI, NTLT Mobile, BidManager, Foreseer and Brightlayer Industrial Monitoring Applications.

Lead User Experience Architect (Consultant – Project Bought by Eaton) - BWS - Boston, MA (Remote/Hybrid)

(2018-11 - 2019-05)

Developed UX/CX strategy plan to drive product planning decisions based on user research. Plan outlined a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods that focused on supplying BWS insight into their customer base and determining market opportunities for offerings of alternative energy monitoring.

Lead Principal User Experience Architect (UX Product Generalist - Contractor) - Thomson Reuters via TalentNet - Sewickley, PA

(2017-05 - 2018-11)

HCI contractor for Thomson Reuter's Legal eBilling Software Suite. Contract was initially for one year and was then extended until Blackstone bought the software suite. Acting as both the Technical Product Manager/PO and UX Strategist, I developed and implemented UX research strategies and created functional requirements and designs for two major enterprise platform redesigns within the Thomson Reuters family of software: transitioning legacy applications into SaaS-based applications.

Through UX Research methods, Design Thinking workshops and collaboration with IT/Developers I facilitated discovery and design requirement sessions that re-framed initial efforts. In addition to research and design responsibilities, I led a hybrid distributed/remote team of five fulltime employees and one consultant: 2 UX/UI Designers, 1 UX/UI Developer, 2 hybrid UX Generalists and a Graphic Designer.

• Directed research and design for legal billing and matter tracking SaaS platforms, aligning with compliance-driven workflows.
• Increased SUS scores by 200% through iterative usability testing and stakeholder collaboration.
• Co-founded TR's design system, creating a component library of 30+ elements in 2.5 months.

Lead User Experience Engineer/Strategist (Consultant) - Autosoft DMS - West Middlesex, PA

(2016-07 - 2017-04)

Initially brought on to develop their UXD strategy and execute user research for their Accounting and CRM modules for a major software redesign of their enterprise DMS: transitioning the desktop-based DMS software application into a SaaS cloud-based application. Was kept on retainer after initial research work concluded to establish a UX presence that was embedded within their development team.

• Introduced field study discovery work into their requirement elicitation processes and conducted research with dealerships which led to identifying specific user pain points and development opportunities in several modules of the DMS.

Master's degree - HCI/UX research