dbt Labs

Overview

Staff Product Designer working across the core data transformation platform used by thousands of data teams worldwide. Over 3 years, I shipped major features across orchestration, cost management, design systems, authentication, and platform configuration. Frequently operating in dual designer/PM capacity and contributing directly to frontend codebases.

Cost Management

Shipped a cost monitoring solution enabling customers to analyze spend and savings across external accounts, giving teams their first clear view of the true cost of transformations in dbt. The internal alpha demo enabled a single data team member to save almost 8% with a couple hours of work with the increased visibility.

Cost management dashboard, full screen, account level visibility.

Orchestration & Deployment

Configuring jobs and environments was slow and error-prone, with initial setup taking 2+ weeks. Developers lacked confidence in code changes before merging. Led design for all scheduling and orchestration products.

• Redesigned job and environment configuration flows, introducing job templates that reduced setup time from 2+ weeks to same-day while enabling best-practice implementation patterns.
• Designed Advanced CI workflows allowing developers to verify record-level changes before merging code.
• Contributed to a logging overhaul that unified CLI and platform experiences for consistency regardless of where users worked.

As a designer and product manager, I shipped projects to add resiliency and failsafes for customers including the ability to trigger on job completion, revert to a repository cache incase of 3rd party outage, and retry from failure.

Design Systems

• Built a unified AI agent component library, creating a shared pattern language across product areas where none existed.
• Led the product-side brand refresh, coordinating updated surfaces for the launch of dbt's new Fusion engine alongside marketing's brand refresh.
• Designed and implemented a fully accessible light/dark mode color token system — 400+ semantic tokens spanning visualizations, syntax highlighting, and components.
  • Added build scripts that reduced the process of adding new color ramps from days to under an hour.
  • Supported 250+ primitives for 23 color ramps providing both general product UI and lineage node colors.
  • Built out the colors leveraging OKLCH and optimized the middle of the ramp for maximum chroma.
  • It supports easy accessibility rules when mixing background and foreground colors, and rule of thumb guidelines when dipping into primitives to get rough AA or AAA similar to magic numbers.
• Top design contributor across multiple accessibility audit cycles. Outside paternity leave, top contributor to the design system and top 10 across all UI repositories.
• Extended the system to companion VS Code themes.

Enterprise Auth & Security

Enterprise customers need robust authentication and security controls. Existing flows were outdated and the platform needed to migrate auth providers without disrupting active users.

• Updated login, email, and SSO flows, including updating all 3rd party touch points.
• One time migration wizard to change auth providers.
• Designed flows for personal and service access tokens, multi-factor login, IP restrictions, and PrivateLink to meet enterprise security needs.

Platform Configuration

Built out reusable data warehouse connections to avoid sharing of private keys in email and Slack and enable faster configurations.

Run details with improved navigation experience and ability to sort and filter by node types. Comes with design updates to CLI logs, resizable drawer component, sticky accordions, and page header with metadata. Inserting custom UI components into AI chat experiences to link to other parts of the platform. Released two VS Code themes to match the updated in platform experience. Syntax highlighting will match exactly so whereever a developer is working from, there is consistent interfaces.