UX + Product Design Leadership · Denver
I’m Kelley Poturalski, a UX and product design leader who combines creativity, logic, research, and systems thinking to help teams make better products—and better decisions.
Selected work
I’m most useful when the problem crosses product, design, engineering, operations, and customer reality.
Mapped product differences across business lines to separate true customer needs from legacy implementation choices—giving teams a shared way to discuss where experiences could converge.
Partnered with designers and engineers to publish shared tokens, patterns, and reusable components before dedicated funding existed, creating a practical foundation for modernization and a future rebrand.
Helped a product design team move from occasional validation to a repeatable testing habit—108 usability tests in nine months—so product tradeoffs were grounded in observed behavior instead of opinion.
Led design through complex service experiences shaped by eligibility, scheduling, client-specific rules, accessibility, and older technology. The goal: modernize the experience without disrupting the people who rely on it every day.
Leadership
Direct feedback and high standards work better when people know they’re respected. I try to make candor useful, not theatrical.
Ask what changed. Ask what we’re assuming. Ask what the customer is doing—not just what they say they want.
I like player-coach leadership: setting direction, clearing obstacles, mentoring designers, and staying close enough to the work to help.
Great product work needs imagination and structure. I use systems, research, prototypes, and measurable outcomes to turn ideas into decisions teams can act on.
“Bring structure to messy problems, make the invisible visible, and help the team move.”
I’ve led designers across enterprise products, consumer experiences, mobile, web, service design, design systems, accessibility, and AI-enabled product development.
My sweet spot is the middle of strategy and execution: translating business goals into a product direction, creating enough structure to align people, and then helping the team ship.
What I bring
Vision, prioritization, experience strategy, complex workflow simplification.
Coaching, hiring, operating rhythms, critique, career growth, stakeholder trust.
Tokens, components, governance, accessibility, design-to-code collaboration.
Usability testing, analytics, experiments, customer insight, evidence-based decisions.
Rapid concepting, workflow comparison, prototyping, system-aware generation.
Product, engineering, marketing, operations, executives, and distributed teams.
About Kelley
I’ve spent my career helping teams make complex products easier to understand and use. Along the way I’ve moved between product design, design leadership, service design, systems work, and organizational problem-solving.
I’m energized by smart, funny, generous people, ambiguous problems, and the moment a team suddenly sees a path forward. I believe the best leaders create clarity, make room for others to contribute, and keep learning themselves.
Outside work, I’m usually making something, biking somewhere, reading with the Denver UX community, or turning a half-formed idea into a project before anyone has had the chance to stop me.
Let’s make something useful