Amélie Lamont

About

Research & Strategy Executive with 20+ years mapping opportunities, synthesizing research, and translating ambiguity into clear strategic direction grounded in business metrics. Builds research-driven discovery practices across startups, agencies, in-house teams, and Fortune 500 organizations, with a track record spanning AI strategy, service/experience strategy, workshop facilitation, and product definition through measurable outcomes. Leads UX strategy and product development efforts from discovery to alignment and roadmap definition, including enterprise and consumer engagements across global brands.

Experience

• Discovery Advisor · User Space Craft (formerly by amélie. studio)01-01-2000

  Lead discovery engagements for clients seeking product definition clarity, including conducting research and delivering actionable recommendations to enable a confident path forward. • Colgate: Reframed Colgate’s approach to PromoAI, an internal AI-powered trade promotion tool, after discovery revealed the team needed to design for adoption rather than mandate it, enabling v1 to launch. • Unqueue: Clarified product scope for Unqueue’s first-time founder, enabling them to win the 2023 Caribbean FinTech Sprint and scale to a UNCDF-backed platform serving 52,000+ smallholder farmers across the Caribbean. • Travelers Insurance: Shaped Travelers Insurance’s HomeSkillet market validation by developing a strategic framework that synthesized 900+ hazard data points into a locus-of-control model, surfacing actionable insights to prospective homeowners. • Irth: Orchestrated UX strategy and product development for Irth, a mobile app helping Black and Brown birthing people find safe obstetric care, launching on Android and iOS with 10,000 pre-loaded reviews and securing a $200,000 grant from the Tara Health Foundation. Clients include: Colgate, MetLife, Meta, Travelers Insurance, Apple, Adobe, Hoag Hospital

• UX Director · AKQA04-01-2023 – 11-01-2025

  Oversaw client strategy and research for a global agency portfolio while building the Portland UX practice from scratch, operating simultaneously as a strategic client lead and an internal practice builder. • Nike: Synthesized research on Michael Jordan’s legacy, Gen Z behavior, and global accessibility into a product vision for Jordan Brand’s AI-powered training platform, securing Michael Jordan’s personal approval and opening executive funding conversations for a 2027 Olympics launch. • Dell: Translated Dell’s ambiguous business challenges into clear strategic direction across consumer and enterprise engagements spanning B2C, B2B, and AI strategy. • ISG AI: Reframed Dell’s page redesign brief as an internal alignment effort, delivering an adopted roadmap addressing friction in a B2B experience tied to a $33.9B business. • AI Exploration: Owned research, strategy, and ethics considerations behind Dell’s blue-sky B2C AI vision, a VP-commissioned deliverable that aligned Dell executives on the next phase of AI investment beyond chatbots. • Capital One: Identified organizational gaps across Capital One’s cafe ecosystem and redirected the engagement toward cross-functional alignment and service design, surfacing the true scope of the work and reshaping the SOW into a multi-phase plan that accounted for the complexity the original brief missed. • LVMH: Delivered the strategic research foundation for the Fresh Cosmetics redesign in a 4-week discovery that included stakeholder interviews, behavioral research, competitive analysis, and a Google Analytics review that shaped the creative vision and direction. • AKQA: Built the AKQA Portland UX practice from scratch, establishing a four-pillar department growth model and peer review framework, and founded the North America UX leadership forum connecting previously siloed UX studio leaders across the region. • AKQA Roots: Chaired AKQA Roots, the company’s Black ERG, building branding and operational systems that enabled sustainable leadership transitions, and partnered with Black ERGs across WPP globally to produce Juneteenth and Black History Month programming yearly. • AKQA A3 Award: Received the A3 Award for ERG leadership and external advocacy work, presented quarterly to acknowledge efforts advancing allyship, advocacy, and activism within AKQA and wider society. Clients include: Nike, LVMH, Delta Airlines, Dell, Aritzia, Capital One

• Senior Product Designer · thoughtbot2018 – 2019

  Clients include: Carvana, Joydrive, Lola • Managed $300K+ discovery engagements using design sprints, qualitative research, and product workshops to define product direction and secure early-stage funding. • Established the studio’s research-driven discovery practice as strategic lead, becoming the go-to lead for discovery, research, and sprint engagements across the client portfolio.

• Product Design Lead · The New York Times2016 – 2017

  • Spearheaded the User Hub redesign, a strategic initiative that contributed to Q4 2017 digital subscription revenue of $89M, a 40% year-over-year increase. • Transformed designer-engineer collaboration by bringing engineers into design feedback sessions, establishing office hours, and treating their input as integral to the process, shifting the team from waterfall handoffs to genuine cross-functional partnership.

• Lead Product Designer · VenueBook2015 – 2016

  • Directed UX strategy and redesign that improved booking conversions by 650%, from 2% to 15%, contributing directly to a $6M Series A funding round. • Founded VenueBook’s design practice, establishing research-driven ways of working and reframing design’s role for executive leadership from aesthetic execution to data-informed decision making tied to business outcomes.

Education

• School of Visual ArtsMA, Design, Research, Writing, & Criticism

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