Elysia Garbade

Guest Lecturer

Lander University

Mar 2026 - Current (6 months)

S

Fractional Design Leader

Sequoia Labs

Oct 2025 - Current (11 months)

I work to guide and mentor teams to build visionary and loved design experiences that deliver value to clients and impact business value. My role is at the intersection of user experience, strategy, and technology to build strong businesses that are set up to thrive in our digital first world. I deliver results and impact for my clients by increasing customers, retaining clients, optimizing costs, improving processes, implementing new systems, launching innovative products, and leading high-performing teams. Customers I work with today: - Leading mental health company redefining online strategy. User Research, AI synthesis, Shopify builds and education tools to give more people the growth tools for every day health. - SaaS Climate verificat

Principal Product Designer (Director Level-impact role)

NCX

Mar 2025 - Jul 2025 (5 months)

Climate-tech startup focused on Nature-Based Solutions to improve forest health and wildlife/habitat diversity by using capital markets to support landowner income and management plans. Product influenced behavior change for better economic and environmental results. → Leading design at 16-person climate-tech startup—operated as de facto Head of Design, leading design strategy, execution, and cross-functional alignment. → Partnered directly with CEO and Chief Product Officer to shape product vision and roadmap, contributing to 3 major feature launches and 3% increase in member growth and retention. → Influenced Product Roadmap to define client segments, implement product-market fit experimentation and dual track agile. Used AI-powered produ

Climatebase Fellow

Climatebase

Mar 2025 - Jun 2025 (4 months)

Participated in Cohort 7 of the Climatebase Fellowship, the climate career accelerator for mission-driven professionals. The Climatebase Fellowship combines a 12-week industry-oriented educational program and ongoing community membership throughout the year. Each cohort hosts over 100 expert guest speakers, career support, project-based work, and a supportive network of highly talented peers, optimists, doers and creators.

Director of Experience & Product Design

Charles Schwab

Mar 2018 - Aug 2024 (6 years 6 months)

→ Managed a team of ~20 w 2 levels: team managers + individual contributors. Led 5 programs across Schwab Digital that includes 23 cross-discipline UX team. → Executed high visibility, high stakes initiatives: Innovative product designed within 1 year with robust research/data-backed decisions. Acquired assets of $1.5B in 4 months. → Incremental design delivery: Supported Charitable: $5B to charities in 2023. Built empowered teams to develop hypotheses based business objectives and guided donor experience initiatives. Data and client backed rationale for journey, content, E2E experience / planned UX Research. Launched grant automation, 5% reduction of calls, Client Easy Score of 98, increase recurring grants 2%, led introduction and convers

Product Design Manager

Transamerica

Jul 2017 - Mar 2018 (9 months)

Financial institution providing Wealth management services with 11,000 employees nation-wide. Serves over 6 million customers and grossing over $472 billion, the company is transforming to deliver customer focused digital products to keep up with the needs of the everyday user. → Built and maintained a multi-disciplinary team of 5 designers → over 21 in 6 months; Allocated resourcing for 6+ products company-wide split between UX, UI and UX Researchers. → Transformed design team from unknown commodity to a lauded product design team known for incredible user-centered experiences that delivered quality, high-craft, system-thinking software SaaS products. → Built transparent and accountable processes with cross-discipline teams using new softw

Lead UX Designer

N26

Jun 2016 - May 2017 (1 year)

German Fintech bank servicing 17 European countries with over 350,000 customers, built to disrupt the highly regulated German banking industry.  Mobile-first hub for banking, investing, insurance and more. → Led strategy and design and implementation of the information architecture model for the migration ecosystem to move over 170,000 customers to their new licensed bank. I built, tested and implemented – retaining 96.1% of all bank customers from one bank platform to another. Resulting in increased engagement and satisfaction at 86% with 3.9% outflow. Web, iOS, Android. → Assisted Head of Design managing and building 10 member design team. Grew team's craft, user understanding, behavior and strategy. → Conceived and implemented the develo

S

Lead UX Designer

Social Credits - Social Empowerment

Jan 2015 - Jun 2015 (6 months)

Social Credits aim to bridge the gap between the available private capital and the massive need for sustainable economic growth and infrastructure. Started by a Young Global Leader, Ali Adnan Ibrahim in 2013. → Design strategy for web presence. Including Information Architecture, Jobs to be Done, and new visual styling and content for website. I defined logo,color scheme, and photographic treatment. → Transformed site into professional, trustworthy and informative space to share concepts, white papers and strategic direction. → Organization, design and implementation for G-20 summit presentation. If you have the chance, you should definitely read the incredibly inspiring write up about the founder Ali Ibrahim. http://bit.ly/1TAjTe2 or read

Social Impact Fellow - (Design Team Lead at Quest)

Quest Alliance

Jan 2014 - Jul 2014 (7 months)

Education Innovation NGO in Bangalore, India. It transforms education through technology, capacity building, and collaboration—fostering self-learning in young people and educators to drive economic and social progress in India’s learning ecosystems. Reached over 1 Million learners India-wide. Operating in 25+ states via government partnerships and digital platforms. → Crafted unified vision for design team: building out a roadmap for products and processes with most impactful return. → Directed design team, instilling Human-Centered Design methodology throughout the company’s practices: including cross-team collaboration and design learning workshops. → Orchestrated project teams in India through fieldwork, analysis, synthesis and product

Product Design Consultant

Independent Consultant

Aug 2009 - Aug 2017 (8 years 1 month)

Collaboration with design agencies, startups and NGOs to design and build marketing digital experience, SaaS products, and product apps to deliver on design strategy and create branded, personalized experiences that built trust, functionality and delight in customer interactions. → Disney w Punchcut, SF experience agency. Working with one of the most renowned theme parks, I worked to carve out new experiences that would excite users for an upcoming offering in a very crowded market. → ClearMob, a media aggregate SaaS startup. I re-architected system flows that were slowing down developer build and customer follow through. This translated to higher product efficiency and a more streamlined user process. → Kindara, Femtech Startup health app.

User Experience Designer

frog

May 2009 - Nov 2009 (7 months)

→ AT&T phone operating system, Design System and definition of Interaction patterns. → Worked with a team of 20 other designers, defining the product experience and visual aesthetic while remaining true to the brand. → Imagined and organized Design System for a novel interface of interaction patterns within design brand guidelines and known Product human behavior → Develop new interactions, human behavior and estimate needs based on research, engineering parameters and human patterns

Sr UX Designer

frog

Feb 2009 - Jan 2014 (5 years)

Top international design experience consultancy, focused on product realization, business growth strategy and innovative, customer centric product design. 600 Employees, 11 locations, 7 countries $30 million revenue. → Clients include of Intel, Google, AT&T, UCLA Healthcare Innovation Lab, GE, Hewlett Packard, The Genome Project, Alcatel Lucent, Disney, JP Morgan Chase, Nike Girl Project, Stanford, Opower, Telstra (Australian telecom), Advent Financial Software, Verizon, Yellow Pages & Chevron. → Project themes ranged from business/product placement strategy, vision setting, qualitative research, opportunity segmentation, field research, user experience and web/application product solutions, visual design, brand building, corporate presenta

U

User Interface and Visual Designer

May 2007 - Jan 2009 (1 year 9 months)

Boutique design agency, focused on web and micro-site marketing, bought by Google in 2013. → Clients included Clif Bar, Microsoft, Sprint, Nest Naturals, and Spanish Quarter winery → Sprint: Worked on Information Architecture and design of first ever smartphone (Sprint Nexus, pre-iPhone 2008) in addition to IA/UX of flip phones with engineers of Fox Engineering in Redwood City, CA. → Nest Naturals: organic products holding company built by Clif Bar Exec. Designed, conceived and worked with development to create website. → Clif Bar Luna Chix: Research, trendscraping, stakeholder interviews and iterative design process were all tools used to create outstanding, on-target products that drove customer relationships and User engagement. → Redesi

UX | UI | Motion Designer

EVB

May 2005 - May 2007 (2 years 1 month)

Pioneering digital marketing focused on Millennials, with over $8 million in revenue. → Clients included Adidas, Kashi, Wrigley/Orbitz, Axe, Gallo of Sonoma, Best Buy and Leapfrog. → Worked congruently in design and motion, developing a practice of collaboration with my engineers/programmers. → Developed concepts, communicated with clients, worked with project managers to hit deadlines, and sync with programmers to ensure a beautiful final deliverable.

Junior Designer

Publicis

Feb 2005 - Apr 2005 (3 months)

3rd largest international marketing and communications digital agency worldwide. → Developed and produced email campaigns, banner ad motion graphics and visuals as well as national print campaigns. → Sprint account: I worked closely with the art director to create compelling, branded email campaigns for Sprint. Generated increased CTR and funnel metrics → Charles Schwab account: designed and built visuals, motion and production for the banner ads to generate increased CTR and funnel metrics → Comcast account: supported print and digital ad campaign that spanned bus stop ads, website and print posters and magazine ads where I created branded and compelling visuals throughout all avenues and markets.

N

Freelance Designer

NC State College of Design

Jan 2004

The Industrial Design chair asked me to design their poster for Design Week. The beautiful poster was printed front and back and handed out at a major conference held yearly.

About

Detail

Timeline

Résumé