Reason to hire #1

To Whom It May Concern

Nicole Lian worked as our Product Design Intern at Funding Societies for six months. During that time, she built our Design System from the ground up and has set a high bar for us to continue working towards.

As her direct manager, I have seen her demonstrate curiosity, creative problem-solving skills, and leadership in the craft of user experience and its implementation.

Nicole is a rare individual who is fearless in deliberately getting lost in a subject, ingesting massive amounts of information, and developing her own perspective on it so she can help bring others up to speed quickly.

I saw Nicole embrace the struggles of being a true beginner in difficult and abstract topics and work tirelessly to transfer actionable insights to the team. Her research brought best practices to help Funding Societies achieve a smoother, easier, more accurate design-to-development process.

Nicole may have been our intern, but she became our resident expert and unofficial leader in our Design System. The project involved every digital product at Funding Societies. From the very beginning, Nicole was a natural collaborator and enabled different functions to work well together.

An empathetic, outstanding communicator (both verbally and in writing), Nicole has been instrumental in bridging the gap between Design and Engineering. Members from diverse teams turn to Nicole about questions surrounding the Design System and many have expressed unsolicited compliments in regards to Nicole’s personality and performance to me.

When I first interviewed Nicole, she defined her own meaningful outcomes of the internship. Her mammoth goal was to launch the first lovable version of the Design System. Six months later, I can attest to her impressive discipline to see things through to completion.

Nicole knows what a great product looks and feels like and had the confidence to challenge the team to produce the best possible result when she know it’s not up to our bar or excellence.

Nicole has been a pleasure to mentor and work alongside.