Hey, there!
I’m Sasha. I’m a Staff Product Designer at Affinity. With degrees in psychology, anthropology, and education, I am a people-person that specializes in understanding the human psyche and human behavior. I translate that knowledge into building intuitive and educational platforms.
Here's the long story…
2011-2015
Amherst College
Drawn to understanding people and societies within a sociocultural lens, I decided to study psychology and anthropology at Amherst. I supplemented my education by also studying Japanese; it helped me explore how language influences the human perspective.
2015-2017
UPenn Graduate Study
Now more specifically drawn to educational anthropology and cognitive psychology, I completed my 2-year graduate research. My research focused on how the incorporation of intertextual shifts as a pedagogical tool could help build student engagement and text-to-self connections.
2018-2019
Discovering Design
Having established a passion for the application of research to solving real-world problems, after moving to the Bay Area I discovered user experience design. I was excited about exploring how ethnographic and psychology research could be used in the digital space so I completed a 1-yr intensive UX design program with Bloc, focusing on UX strategy, ideation, and prototyping.
2019-2020
Cloudbees
Working in a fast-paced environment dedicated to supporting the entire application life-cycle from development to deployment. CloudBees gave me the opportunity to challenge my technical knowledge and empathize with a user-base that is versatile and opinionated.
2020-2021
Earnup
EarnUp is a mission-drive start-up where I was given the opportunity to lead design initiatives, research, and develop the first design system. As the primary product designer, I worked across multiple projects and mentored an associate designer.
2021-2023
Drift
Drift®, the buyer experience and Conversational AI company, inspires businesses to create more engaging customer experiences, one conversation at a time. As a Product Designer, I spearheaded critical initiatives to evolve Drift from a standalone chat tool into a robust, multi-tenant enterprise platform.
2023-Present
Affinity
Affinity automates data entry, surfaces relationship insights, and gives teams the context they need to act on every opportunity. From Identity & Access Management, Core UX, and now AI, I have worked across the platform to deliver intuitive experiences.