Sharon Orienza

Senior UX Researcher and Product Design Leader with extensive experience guiding distributed teams to deliver user-centered solutions for complex e-commerce and SaaS products. Led the end-to-end redesign of Cardinal Health's OrderExpress platform, boosting transaction efficiency and customer satisfaction, and built a 12-person UX team across four time zones. Proven ability to define design strategy, translate ambiguous problems into clear UX direction, and partner with product, engineering, and business stakeholders.

Ready to leverage this expertise to drive impactful product experiences and business outcomes.

UX Strategist, PM and Product Design Consulting at Orienza Designs LLC (2000-01 – Present)

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 at Cardinal Health (2022-08 – 2025-08)

Led and developed a distributed UX team of 12+ designers and contractors across four U.S. time zones while driving design strategy for Cardinal Health's B2B/B2C commerce ecosystem. Partnered with Product, Engineering, Research, Risk, Legal, Operations, and business leaders to translate complex customer and operational problems into scalable product direction across ordering, pricing, fulfillment, search, checkout, and order management.

• Led the UX team through the redesign of OrderExpress; a transaction-heavy B2B/B2C eCommerce platform, setting design direction, mentoring designers, establishing expectations, and using research and task analysis to improve customer and business workflows.
• Led end-to-end product design across AI-powered search, product discovery, navigation, pricing, fulfillment, order management, checkout, and subscription/recurring-purchase experiences within a complex enterprise commerce ecosystem, which reduced checkout friction and increased order completion rates.
• Established DesignOps practices that improved visibility, traceability, and operational efficiency across UX research and design work; embedded heuristic evaluation, CASTLE/HEART/SUS metrics, usability testing, and customer insights into Agile planning.
• Led bi-weekly design system workshops to define component usage, interaction standards, responsive/mobile patterns, governance, and quality expectations, improving consistency and scalability across the product portfolio.
• Co-led product prioritization with senior stakeholders and Development, balancing customer needs, business outcomes, technical constraints, fulfillment operations, and long-term platform scalability, which produced a clear, prioritized roadmap and enabled timely delivery of high-impact features.
• Developed a UX Playbook & onboarding knowledgebase in Microsoft Teams to accelerate research/design ramp-up and cross-functional collaboration.

User Experience Manager at Vertiv (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, translating ambiguous business and technical problems into actionable design priorities.
• Facilitated over a dozen design thinking workshops to align engineering, operations, manufacturing, and business stakeholders around customer needs, product opportunities, and shared outcomes.
• Doubled adoption of UX methods across live R&D projects in 90 days through stakeholder education, coaching, and process integration within an Agile environment.
• Built a DesignOps system that identified high-value projects and created a scalable approach for determining where UX research and design could deliver the greatest impact.

Lead UX Product Engineer (Contractor through Softworld) at SYNOPSYS via Softworld (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 adoption for new discovery research methods as well as introducing workflow workshops and iterative prototyping with SMEs to accelerate the requirement gathering process.

• 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 developers through the introduction of diagram workshops and iterative prototyping, clarifying user and business needs while accelerating design decisions.
• 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) at Eaton via BWS (2019-05 – 2021-06)

Joined Eaton following its acquisition of BWS applications and reported to the Director of R&D. Initially operated as a UX "Team of One," defining UX strategy, research, and product design for the Center of Excellence in Applications before building a small UX team. Represented UX in quarterly leadership planning and partnered with global Product, R&D, Business, and Development teams on strategy, prioritization, budgeting, and delivery.

• Led end-to-end research and design of responsive IoT monitoring interfaces and mobile energy/EV charging apps, coordinated R&D, Product, and Business teams, which improved user satisfaction and sped up feature releases and overall application rollout.
• Built and developed a UX team from a "Team of One," establishing roles, processes, research practices, and design standards that enabled UX to scale across Eaton's Center of Excellence.
• Led UX strategy and implementation for zero-to-one responsive IoT monitoring interfaces and mobile-native energy and EV charging applications, balancing customer needs, business goals, technical constraints, and platform scalability, which enhanced cross-platform consistency and reduced development rework.
• Conducted discovery research that reframed product hypotheses and saved $100K in the first three months, demonstrating the value of research-driven product strategy.

Lead User Experience Architect (Consultant – Project Bought by Eaton) at BlueWave Solar (BWS) (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) at Thomson Reuters via TalentNet (2017-05 – 2018-11)

HCI contractor for Thomson Reuters' 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, enabling faster compliance reporting and improved user adoption.
• Increased SUS scores by 200% through iterative usability testing and stakeholder collaboration.
• Co-founded Thomson Reuters' design system, creating a component library of 30+ elements in 2.5 months.

Lead User Experience Engineer/Strategist (Consultant) at Autosoft DMS (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 applications.

Master's degree - HCI/UX research