Hiiieee! I’m Kaytee*.
I’m a chronically excited product design leader with a knack for solving intractable problems.
In 2023, I joined Mayo Clinic to lead design discovery and strategy for Clinical Trials Beyond Walls, an initiative focused on expanding access to clinical trials through building robust, sustainable systems that support fully-remote participation.
Previously, I was principal product designer at NPR, where I applied my deep expertise in product design, research, and strategy to define and solve many of public media’s most pressing, tangly challenges.
In an earlier role at Marriott International, I led all design efforts for the first fully-native relaunch of their flagship booking app.
*Formerly Nesmith, now Blake!-
🤠 My name’s spelling is the result of a 14+ year-long bet
✡️ I’ve been learning Yiddish since April 2021!
🐶 My dog’s full name is Isabelle Petunia Nesmith-Blake
✨ Aries sun, Aquarius moon, Libra rising (shhhh, it’s fun!)
🎨 I make tiny paintings and leave them around DC
🐴 Horses freak me the &*^% out
❣️ I use exclamation marks in emails without apology!
💀 I was a teenage mall goth
💃🏻 I used to dance professionally and now all my joints hurt
🌭 I auditioned to be the Oscar Meyer kid in, idk, 1995?
I’m equal parts designer, researcher, strategist, coach, and facilitator.
I excel in:
Leading collaborative product discovery, ensuring teams solve for the right problems, for the right people, at the right time.
Creating robust, human-centered product and platform strategies that emphasize sustainability and scalability every step of the way.
Conducting in-depth exploratory design research to define and better understand the problem spaces at hand.
Transforming deeply-rooted, seemingly intractable problems into actionable insights, requirements, and OKRs.
Fostering meaningful collaboration across disciplines to empower teams with a deep understanding of user needs and behaviors.
Encouraging confidence, growth, independence, and resilience amongst designers through mentorship and coaching.
Smashing silos to form high-performing coalitions to simplify buy-in processes, manage stakeholder expectations, and inform design.
Facilitating generative workshops and co-design sessions to glean meaningful input from all perspectives and areas of expertise.
Here’s what it’s like to work with me.
“Kaytee is a natural leader, who works hard to build consensus and trust within her teams. She communicates clearly, and shows tremendous empathy for her coworkers and our audiences.”
— Director of Product Design, NPR“Kaytee’s empathetic approach makes those around her feel seen and heard, and she has a knack for smart questions that help everyone focus on the purpose and intent of the task at hand.”
— Technical program manager, npr“Kaytee is a strong systems thinker and understands not only how to use design to uncover the right problems to solve and design the right thing, but also how to use design methods to engage others and support change management.”
— Design lead, mayo clinic“Kaytee approaches her work with passion, curiosity, and flexibility. She is extremely talented at bringing order to chaos; she can take a very unstructured idea and tame it own into a coherent set of principles that we can design against.”
— Director of PRODUCT management, NPR“Kaytee’s strong facilitation skills have strengthened our newly-formed, multidisciplinary team’s ability to apply user-centered design thinking by initiating a practice of collaborative workshops at both the leadership and team level.”
— PRODUCT manager, Mayo Clinic“Kaytee does a great job of providing leadership and coaching for her fellow design colleagues. She walks the delicate line of being open and honest while also shielding them from chaos with ease.”
— Director of product design, NPR“Kaytee just seamlessly moves from the strategic to tactical; it’s an inspiration. Her vision and ability to work at any level elevation — from 50mm to 50,000m — means she can deliver detailed visual designs and lead strategy.”
— prODUCT Manager, NPR“Kaytee has been a fantastic partner to engineering. She is an absolute pleasure to work with.”
— Engineering lead, NPR