Peter Sharp, M.F.A.
Staff Service Designer | Experience Strategy
Portland, OR | Open to remote and relocation
Summary
I untangle complex services where people are at the core of the business model: I find the gap that costs trust, loyalty or conversion, and change how the organization decides to close it. A decade of product and motion design, including two US patents, keeps the strategy tangible. MFA, Service Design (SCAD).
Experience
Staff Product Designer
Corteva | Remote | May 2023 - June 2026
Service design and design strategy for a ~250-person product organization serving the independent sales agents who sell its seed to farmers.
- Widened a roadmap built for the few engaged sales agents to include the majority who weren’t, and moved its lens from on-field tools to running the agency as a business; the research, frameworks and workshops I led shaped the leadership white papers behind both shifts, freeing sales agents’ time for the farmer relationships that sell seed.
- After shipped features kept missing their OKRs, founded the Design Strategy Center of Excellence and won senior leadership approval for job-based annual planning, which now decides the ~10 projects funded each year from a $50M CapEx budget.
- Scaled jobs-to-be-done across the organization without a mandate, mentoring key allies (my manager, a senior designer and a senior researcher) and piloting the first experience team, which expanded to employees and farmers. The following year, the quarterly customer survey (n = 1,400) showed +13% perceived success, +11% trust and +6% satisfaction.
- Changed what the organization measured: partnered with research and analytics leads to score the customer survey and product analytics against customer jobs, tying the engagement OKR to real needs.
- Turned ~120 support tickets into a funded investment: brought product, commercial, marketing and customer-support leaders into one prioritization workshop, then wrote the white paper that won funding for expanded reporting, including GenAI summaries.
Senior UX Designer
Amazon | Austin, TX | May 2022 - February 2023
Service design and research for Last Mile’s pickup and drop-off access points, in the US and internationally.
- Reframed a two-option checkout decision into the question of who access-point customers were. Field research (driver ride-alongs, contextual inquiry, co-creation in the US and Spain) surfaced use cases the organization didn’t know existed.
- Defined the Durable Customer Outcomes, nine customer archetypes adopted as the organization’s shared definition of its customers, and built the service blueprint that connected the Last Mile and access-point teams.
- Won director approval for a multi-city international ethnographic program, named the department’s most important research for the next year.
Lead UX Researcher
IBM | Austin, TX | March 2021 - April 2022
Research lead for OpenPages with Watson, AI-driven governance, risk and compliance software.
- Refocused the free trial on the moments that lead prospects to buy, through research that identified which capabilities mattered most to them, so trial users reach value sooner.
- Led onboarding and free-trial research for the OpenPages interface that won a 2021 Red Dot Award (ten-person design team).
Senior Design Strategist
Booz Allen Hamilton | Washington, DC and Austin, TX | January 2019 - March 2021
Service design and research for federal health and cybersecurity programs.
- Persuaded the client to drop the inherited patient booklet, then prototyped a live dashboard from scratch and shipped it with two data scientists, letting the National Capital Region’s 11 military treatment facilities hear 100,000+ patient comments by topic, sentiment and critical issue. It was adopted across the facilities and outlived the engagement.
- With no budget line, wrote the staffing request, then recruited, hired and managed five part-time practitioners to run discovery across 11 federal agencies for the DHS Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation cybersecurity program.
Service Design Researcher (Graduate Intern)
USAA | Austin, TX | June 2018 - August 2018
Generative research with internal stakeholders on barriers to adopting design methods in a regulated financial-services organization.
Earlier Career
- Senior Product Designer and Motion Graphics Designer, Animoto (video-creation startup), New York, NY, 2011 - 2016. Freelance and studio product design and motion graphics, 2008 - 2017.
Recognition
- Red Dot Award 2021, Brands & Communication Design: IBM OpenPages with Watson (project team).
- US Patents 10,032,484 and 10,068,613 (co-inventor, Animoto, 2018): designer-controlled video builder; intelligent selection of scene transitions.
- Austin Design Week 2021: workshop on systems thinking.
- Mentorship: 94 sessions (50 hours) with designers and researchers via ADPList.
Education
- Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Service Design, Savannah College of Art and Design
- Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Broadcast Design and Motion Graphics, Savannah College of Art and Design
Continuing Education
- Business Thinking for Designers (Second Wave Dive); Systems Thinking for Designers (Design Dissolve); Warm Data Labs (International Bateson Institute)
Tools and Methods
- Service Blueprinting, Journey and Ecosystem Mapping, Systems Thinking, Jobs-to-be-Done, Ethnography and Contextual Inquiry, Gap Analysis (SERVQUAL), Opportunity Mapping, Prototyping and Pilots, Workshop Facilitation, Business Case Development, Capability Mapping, Measurement Frameworks, AI-assisted Research Synthesis (Claude, ChatGPT, Dovetail), Figma