About
I’m Marianne. I design complex products by making sense of people, systems, and real-world constraints.
DESIGNING THROUGH COMPLEXITY. GROUNDED IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR.
Good product decisions begin with understanding human behavior. I believe products work best when they're designed around how people actually behave, not how we wish they behaved. I design product experiences for complex marketplaces, regulated systems, and commerce where the hardest problems rarely live in the interface. They live in competing incentives, operational constraints, and the decisions people make along the way. I start with the constraint, but I design for the person trying to make sense of it. Every solution should balance what the system needs to do, what the business needs to protect, and what the user needs to understand to move forward with confidence. AI is part of my process, not my judgment. I use it to organize ambiguity, explore patterns, and challenge my thinking, creating more space for the work that matters most: understanding people, weighing tradeoffs, and making thoughtful product decisions.
My toolkit
A working toolkit for moving between strategy, design, prototyping, and build.
Designing product experiences, systems, flows, and prototypes.
Operating principles
Six principles I return to
01
Frame before form
I want to be in the room when scope is set, not after. A lot of design problems are constraint problems pretending to be interface problems.
02
Constraints are material
Legal, risk, compliance, operations, and technical limits are not blockers around the work. They are part of the design material, alongside the people affected by them. The work gets better when both are visible early.
03
Write the decision down
I write down the tradeoffs, then prototype the consequences. Good design helps teams see the cost of a decision before users have to feel it.
04
Sequence is strategy
What ships first matters. I care about the order of the work: what needs to be true now, what can wait, and what small release creates the clearest path forward.
05
Design for both sides
Every customer-facing experience creates work somewhere else: for an operator, support team, client, admin, or internal tool user. I try to design with that second-order impact in mind.
06
Calm over clever
In high-trust products, the goal is rarely to impress. It is to help people understand what is happening, make a decision, and move forward with confidence.
Experience
- 2022 — nowSenior Product Designer, MarketplaceWeedmaps
- 2018 — nowIndependent · Product strategy & designSelected clients
- 2019 — 2022Product Designer, B2B LeadSpoton
- 2015 — 2018Founding Product DesignerM1 Finance
- 2014 — 2017UI/UX DesignerSelected clients
Independent practice
I'm developing an independent practice for founders and creative businesses working through what they're building and what comes next.
I tend to work upstream of the final interface — asking questions, connecting the pieces, and understanding the system around the thing we're designing.
Sometimes that leads to a product. Sometimes a website, service, customer journey, clearer offering, or simply a better decision about what should happen next. The output depends on the problem.
Outside work
I originally studied interior design, and I still think like one. I'm endlessly curious about how thoughtfully designed environments influence people's emotions, behaviors, and everyday experiences. Alongside my work in software, I run Slow Made — a candle and lifestyle brand built around slow living, vintage objects, and thoughtful rituals. Making something physical has sharpened how I think about design beyond the screen: materials, margins, packaging, customer trust, and whether something actually holds up over time.
When I’m not working, I’m usually in the garden, at an estate sale, rearranging something in my house, or convincing myself that one more brass object is a strategic acquisition.
If you're ready to transform a complex problem into a focused strategy, intuitive experience, and meaningful outcome. Let's talk.